TIME Person of the Year 2011: The Protester

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132,00.html

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

28 10 15 years ago

time.com

keithwarren• 15 years ago

Maybe they should change this from 'Person' of the year to 'politically motivated thing we want to recognize'

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

They have form on this one; in 2006 it was "You," in recognition of the rise of user generated content.

Kind of annoying that the massive 2010 student protests in the UK never get mentioned in articles like this. Tens of thousands of them occupied their universities for months, stormed and trashed the HQ of one of the governing parties, and attempted to burn down the treasury offices. Running battles with 14 year olds throwing lumps of concrete at police on horseback. It was chaos.

I am by no means condoning it, just pointing out how strange it is that these events never get mentioned in articles like this, because they predate the arab spring/OWS and therefore don't fit the media narrative.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/2010_UK_stude...

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

I think it's very rare that revolutions are not violent. This is why the officials shouldn't get increasingly more greedy and oppressive until they make the citizens respond like that. Because in the end it will be worse off for them - like they could end up executed by whoever gets in charge after the revolution.

It seems the US Government keeps ignoring its citizens, too, heavily voting in favor of bills like SOPA or the NDAA. The OWS protesters have been mainly peaceful, but if they keep this up, the US Government might find itself with a real violent revolution, too. It's up to them to start respecting the Constitution again or keep violating it at every pace until the camel's back will break.

To be honest, I really think everyone who sponsored the NDAA bill should be immediately trialed for treason against the USA. It's such a blatant violation of the Constitution they've sworn to uphold. Bills that effectively remove or disable Amendments from the Constitution at the Congress' whim without consulting the people in a referendum should be illegal.

shadowfiend2• 15 years ago

Well, not fitting the media narrative helps, but it also helps that (a) this is the person “of the year” (2011) and (b) the protests in 2011 were spread around the world and throughout populations, rather than just in one country and its students.

michaelfeathers• 15 years ago

When I was a boy, the Time Person of the Year was a person.

acslater00• 15 years ago

If I organize a protest of Time's complete lack of journalistic credibility, does that make me person of the year???

mbesto• 15 years ago

It's interesting that in the past 10 years, TIME has recognized more "groups" (2002-Whistleblowers, 2003-American Soldier, 2005-Good Samaritans, 2006-You, and now Protestors)[1] than actually a specific person. I think this speaks volumes to how much power groups of individuals have been able to exert and influence over than the individual.

The groups have spoken.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

darien• 15 years ago

As a person that works in magazines (Conde Nast), I can tell you the reason TIme chooses groups over people on their covers is because it will increase magazine sales (ie: people in a specific group are more likely to buy the issue)

shadowfiend2• 15 years ago

There were some people suggesting that the Occupy movement or “the 99%” should be the Person of the Year—I suppose this is pretty close ;)

To those who say the TIME Person of the Year should be an actual person, I think what's happening is that sometimes there's a single person that does extraordinary things in a given year. But sometimes, people, in numbers, anonymous, make changes so much more radical than those a single person can, that it's almost foolish to try and pick a single person for the year, because any given individual's contribution to the year's changes is so very minuscule compared to the crowds that gathered from Σύνταγμα square to Tahrir square to Zucotti Park—some more effective than others, but all changing the way things around them were being discussed, and all fueling each other.

jgfoot• 15 years ago

The article is useful because it repeats and glorifies this shibboleth: "So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but enabling it technologically, as an epiphenomenon of globalization. And for a second act, globalization returned the favor, turning democratic uprisings in developing countries into inspirational exports for the rich world."

First, the Arab Spring protests were the culmination of long-standing movements that magazines like Time paid little attention to until the very end. When Time finally noticed them, Time wrote about the movements as though they were the product of American social networking sites. It always struck me as a very USA-centric thing for an American to look at the Arab Spring and say, "hey, look at what we did!"

Second, the Internet's impact on global freedom is ambiguous; as Evgeny Morozov points out in The Net Delusion, the Internet can be used to promote freedom but also can help oppressive regimes by making propaganda and surveillance easier.

Third, whether the Arab Spring actually promoted "freedom" and democracy remains to be seen; removing a dictator is certainly a step in the right direction, but it isn't the whole journey.

TIME Person of the Year 2011: The Protester

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