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Sunday, December 17, 2006
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In your face, everyone else!!!!
Time tells me what my ego wants to hear: [F]or seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.Hah!! I knew it!!! I knew I was Person-of-the-Year material!! Take that, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- you couldn't do better than second!! Go suck an egg, George W. Bush!! Daniel Craig, I don't care any more that my wife really, really liked that bathing suit scene in Casino Royale. I'm the king of the world!!!! [Um... you know they meant "you" in the global sense--ed.] Oh.... never mind. UPDATE: Ann Althouse believes this gambit is "unbelievably dorky." I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly amusing -- I couldn't stop laughing when I first read it. Beyond the instinct to giggle and the God-awful bubble-headed prose, however, there is the core of an idea worth expanding into a popular book -- the idea of production by consumption. For a wide variety of products, traditional consumers now add value by mixing, matching, riffing, sampling, commenting, critiquing, customizing, and mutating goods and services. In the process, value-added is created. It's an interesting phenomenon, and someone like Virginia Postrel or Robert Wright or James Surowiecki or Steven Johnson should take the idea and run with it -- they'd have to do better than Time. UPDATE: William Beutler predicted Time would do this back in October. posted by Dan on 12.17.06 at 12:11 PMComments: I don't think the magazine's writers were trying to be funny. It sounds as if there was no one they really wanted to name Person of the Year; they spent two or three marathon meetings fueled by coffee, cigarettes, pizza and doughnuts wrestling with that problem, and this is what came out. But I do wonder if Time thinks Hu Jintao is a question. posted by: Zathras on 12.17.06 at 12:11 PM [permalink]Dan wrote: "Beyond the instinct to giggle and the God-awful bubble-headed prose, however, there is the core of an idea worth expanding into a popular book -- the idea of production by consumption. For a wide variety of products, traditional consumers now add value by mixing, matching, riffing, sampling, commenting, critiquing, customizing, and mutating goods and services." The seminal book on this subject is by Michael de Certeau--The Practice of Everyday Life--described in Certeau's wikipedia entry as "a theory of the productive consumptive activity inherent in everyday life." It was published in France in 1974, translated to English in 1984. posted by: pantheranon on 12.17.06 at 12:11 PM [permalink]Despite all Dan's hyperbole about consumption equaling production due to the "mixing, matching, riffing, sampling, commenting, critiquing, customizing, and mutating" any SUCCESSFUL manufacturer could explain the glaring hole in that theory--value is defined by the customer, not the marketers, theorists, or bloggers. Consumptive production is, despite it's thirty-plus year life, really only a paper construct for those who think "Web 2.0" really exists as a tangible entity and that there is such a thing as a "new economy" wherein one can sustain an economic profit model without supplying any goods or services. posted by: Useless Sam Grant on 12.17.06 at 12:11 PM [permalink]http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/12/17/144245/36 Hilarious. posted by: Adrian on 12.17.06 at 12:11 PM [permalink]Post a Comment: |
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