Congratulations, You Won
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20061217_congratulations_you_won/
Posted on Dec 17, 2006
Time announced its “person of the year” on Saturday, dissing everyone from Ahmadinejad to Pelosi in order to declare “you” the winner. Don’t you feel special? Specifically, the magazine highlighted websites including YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace for “bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.”
Time:
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
Read moretime.com
Previous Winners:
- 1927: Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) (first person chosen)
- 1928: Walter Chrysler (1875–1940)
- 1929: Owen Young (1874–1962)
- 1930: Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) (first non-American and first non-white person)
- 1931: Pierre Laval (1883–1945)
- 1932: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)
- 1933: Hugh Johnson (1882–1942)
- 1934: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) (2nd time)
- 1935: Haile Selassie I (1892–1975)
- 1936: Wallis Simpson (1896–1986) (first female chosen)
- 1937: Chiang Kai-Shek (1887–1975) and Soong May-ling (1898–2003) (first couple chosen)
- 1938: Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
- 1939: Joseph Stalin (1879–1953)
- 1940: Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
- 1941: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) (3rd time)
- 1942: Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) (2nd time)
- 1943: George Marshall (1880–1959)
- 1944: Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969)
- 1945: Harry Truman (1884–1972)
- 1946: James F. Byrnes (1879–1972)
- 1947: George Marshall (1880–1959) (2nd time)
- 1948: Harry Truman (1884–1972) (2nd time)
- 1949: Winston Churchill (1874–1965) (2nd time) (Man of the Half-Century)
- 1950: The American Fighting-Man (first abstract chosen)
- 1951: Mohammed Mossadegh (1882–1967)
- 1952: Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926)
- 1953: Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967)
- 1954: John Dulles (1888–1959)
- 1955: Harlow Curtice (1893–1962)
- 1956: Hungarian Freedom Fighter
- 1957: Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971)
- 1958: Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970)
- 1959: Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) (2nd time)
- 1960: U.S. scientists (represented by Linus Pauling, Isidor Rabi, Edward Teller, Adam Fisher, Donald A. Glaser, Willard Libby, Robert Woodward, Charles Draper, William Shockley, Emilio Segre, John Enders, Charles Townes, George Beadle, James Van Allen and Edward Purcell)
- 1961: John F. Kennedy (1917–1963)
- 1962: Pope John XXIII (1881–1963)
- 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)
- 1964: Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973)
- 1965: William Westmoreland (1914–2005)
- 1966: The Generation Twenty-Five and Under
- 1967: Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) (2nd time)
- 1968: Apollo 8 Astronauts Frank Borman (b. 1928), Jim Lovell (b. 1928), William Anders (b. 1933)
- 1969: The Middle Americans
- 1970: Willy Brandt (1913–1992)
- 1971: Richard Nixon (1913–1994)
- 1972: Richard Nixon (1913–1994) (2nd time) and Henry Kissinger (b. 1923)
- 1973: John Sirica (1904–1992)
- 1974: King Faisal (1906–1975)
- 1975: American Women (represented by Betty Ford, Carla Hills, Ella Grasso, Barbara Jordan, Susie Sharp, Jill Conway, Billy Jean King, Susan Brownmiller, Addie Wyatt, Kathleen Byerly, Carol Sutton and Alison Cheek)
- 1976: Jimmy Carter (b. 1924)
- 1977: Anwar Sadat (1918–1981)
- 1978: Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997)
- 1979: Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–1989)
- 1980: Ronald Reagan (1911–2004)
- 1981: Lech Wałęsa (b. 1943)
- 1982: The Computer (first non-human abstract chosen)
- 1983: Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) (2nd time) and Yuri Andropov (1914–1984)
- 1984: Peter Ueberroth (b. 1937)
- 1985: Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) (2nd time)
- 1986: Corazón Aquino (b. 1933)
- 1987: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (b. 1931)
- 1988: Endangered Earth (Planet of the Year)
- 1989: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (b. 1931) (Man of the Decade)
- 1990: George H. W. Bush (b. 1924) (The Two George Bushes)
- 1991: Ted Turner (b. 1938)
- 1992: Bill Clinton (b. 1946)
- 1993: The Peacemakers: Nelson Mandela (b. 1918), F.W. de Klerk (b. 1936), Yasser Arafat (1929–2004), and Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995)
- 1994: Pope John Paul II (1920–2005)
- 1995: Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
- 1996: David Ho (b. 1952)
- 1997: Andy Grove (b. 1936)
- 1998: Bill Clinton (b. 1946) (2nd time) and Kenneth Starr (b. 1946)
- 1999: Jeffrey P. Bezos (b. 1964)
- 2000: George W. Bush (b. 1946)
- 2001: Rudolph Giuliani (b. 1944)
- 2002: The Whistleblowers: Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom (b. 1963), Sherron Watkins of Enron (b. 1959), and Coleen Rowley of the FBI (b. 1954)
- 2003: The American Soldier
- 2004: George W. Bush (b. 1946) (2nd time)
- 2005: The Good Samaritans: Bono (b. 1960), Bill Gates (b. 1955), and Melinda Gates (b. 1964)
- 2006: You[2]
