Both George Will and Frank Rich (the latter alas, behind the TimesSelect wall) – among the preeminent pundits on the right and the left in America – have treated us to their ruminations on the Internet in the past week, specifically the Time cover story naming “you” the magazine’s Person of the Year.
It’s always easy to mock a newsmagazine for yet another goofy trend story, and Time’s is exactly that. But in this case each pundit seizes on the story as an example of social ills that simply don’t exist.
Rich’s message is that we’re retreating into navel-gazing in the virtual world to escape, like the president, from the harsh reality of Iraq:
As of Friday morning, “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” had been viewed 1,041,776 times by YouTube’s visitors. The count for YouTube video clips tagged with “Iraq” was 22,783. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But compulsive blogging and free soft-core porn are not, as Time would have it, indications of how much you, I and that glassy-eyed teenage boy hiding in his bedroom are in control of the Information Age. They are indicators instead of how eager we are to flee from brutal real-world information that makes us depressed and angry. This was the year Americans escaped as often as they could into their private pleasure pods. So the Person of 2006 was indeed you — yes, you.
First of all, Rich shows just how clueless he (or his assistant) is about YouTube. This appears to be the clip he is referencing. It’s a joke – on people who skim YouTube looking for this type of thing.
