Contributed by: filbert Tuesday, December 19 2006 @ 09:01 AM CST
And yet, there is something uniquely demented about this year's choice. It claims to celebrate You, the reader, the YouTuber, the amateur, the activist. Editor Stengel goes so far as to compare You to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. So then what does Time choose to highlight as examples of greatness in action?I have seen the present, and it is vapid.
Leila is a 20-year-old single Muslim woman who lives in Maryland and posts diary videos on YouTube: "She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn't speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background."
Megan Gill is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Portland who just broke up with her boyfriend and changed her status from "dating" to "single" on her Facebook page. She has 708 registered "friends" who check back for regular updates on her site, such as "Megan is so over first semester," "Megan is bummed about the election results," "Megan is tired of letting people down."
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