The writer seems to have imbibed with reckless abandon.
There has been a bit of unseemly grousing about Time's Person of the Year.
That person would, according to the magazine, be you. As in you if you blog, chat, surf or otherwise kind of, like, live on the Internet and view it as an indispensable part of your life and persona.
As in folks on YouTube and MySpace. You know, really hip, cool people.
About this grousing. Shhhhh. You know who you are. You're revealing your lack of coolness.
It's just so predictable. Just as hipsters wear their coolness on their sleeves, type it out on their keyboards or share it in streaming video, those of the uncool persuasion like to wear their uncoolness as badges of honor. They disdain the rabble who autobiographisize to the world daily and those who text message to converse.
But these grousers actually use the Internet all the time. For work, they say. And this, too, becomes a badge of honor, worn by the same folks who try to convince us that all they watch on television are the National Geographic and Discovery channels.
Right. Is that a cell phone in your pocket, and what's that sticking out of your ear?
Welcome to the future. Time magazine got it right. The way the Internet - and technology generally - is being used as the world's new community is revolutionary. It is changing the world as it shrinks it, and we've not seen anything yet.
No need for a breathalyzer. Definitely drunk.
Yes, it can seem scary. We know. You are, after all, likely reading this on a newspaper page. Predicting the demise of newspapers is all the rage these days. The assessments are overblown. In case you didn't notice, even we old newspaper fogies have staked out a huge presence on the Web.
Not me. I read it on the Internet for FREE.
It's simple. Time could recognize how the world is changing and focus some attention on who, in the true spirit of egalitarianism, is doing the changing - regular folks - or it could have given us yet another elder statesperson/rock star/do-gooder/do-badder/genius inventor as its Person of the Year.
Maybe we don't have our snoots in the air like a lot of people because some of us are actual repeats for the magazine's top honor. The middle class was named in 1969 and U.S. women in 1975. And young people were the honorees in 1966. (Yes, members of the Editorial Board were once young.)
So we'll pass on this grousing stuff. It's not that we're, like, all that cool. It just doesn't strike us as particularly wise to tell the folks who will be funding Social Security and driving us around when we can't that they're wrong.
Blog on.
And the Editorial Board will blather on.
The Board is right on this count -- "It's not that we're, like, all that cool."
I agree.
Not cool. Not funny. Not right.
No comments:
Post a Comment