You are person are of the year

005 (Well, it was on Ceefax). Time Magazine has named You person of the year, Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

There is a word to describe this but I don’t want to use it on my weblog, so I shall link to it here. I don’t think any of those definitions really does the word justice except perhaps sense 4 of the artistwd entry. This is the trouble with American definitions of a British word. Anyway, here is the opening paragraph of the Time article to ram the point home, as it were:

The “Great Man” theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

For your convenience, I have abbreviated the rest of the article thus:

…cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia…million-channel people’s network YouTube…online metropolis MySpace…Tim Berners-Lee…Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0…revolution…from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing…rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms…Facebook…Second Life…Amazon…podcasts…global intellectual economy…seizing the reins of the global media…massive social experiment…

In a bucket.