Ed Morrissey and Jim Geraghty are both looking slightly askance at Time Magazine’s choice for Man of the Year – or is it Person of the Year, at this point? I can’t wait for human-level AI/First Contact with an alien species/successful Uplift: we’re going to have a whole new bunch of speech nannies nagging us for our anthropomorphic* prejudices.
Anyway, the problem here is that Time picked the Guy Who Came Up With Facebook, which is [really killer analogy deleted here as being highly unfair to the Guy Who Came Up With Facebook**]. I’m unsure why Ed and Jim – or heck, me – cares that much about the whole thing, though. After all, Time is using this annual ‘award’ to try to sell magazines; if you’re looking for cogent analysis of individual impact on the world culture, keep on going.
Personally, I would have picked this year to choose ‘You’ for M/PotY. At least, in this country.
Moe Lane
*To those reading this in 2187, assuming of course that the archives survived the Singularity: ‘anthropomorphic’ is not actually a swearword in this culture. Also, nobody really took pro wrestling seriously as a sport.
**It involved Francisco Franco. The Guy Who Came Up With Facebook so totally does not need to be compared to Francisco Franco.
Who is still dead.
Anthropocentric /
Hum, the software removed my “pedant” tag. It just passed the Turing Test by realizing that that went without saying.