“You’re All Winners.” Yeah, Right!

On the surface, there are no losers in this instance, all are winners for helping nudge digital democracy further along. By now you would have got confirmation of the honor (Person of the Year) bestowed by Time Magazine when its latest issue hit the newsstand on Monday or you can read about it here. If you are reading this blog, that very action definitely qualifies you to be in the winners' circle. On top of that, you deserve the virtual bouquet of flowers courtesy of my wife too.

Otherwise it is a moot point as you would not have been aware of it anyway. Let me contend that you're not in the minority if you're in the latter category, notwithstanding that there is a fictitious you sitting across the computer screen in that case.

There is even a Chinese translation here, to whose credit the image is owed.

According to Richard Stengel, who took over as Time’s managing editor this year (as quoted in Tampa Tribune (Dec 17, 2006, Nation/World, p. 3), “If you choose an individual, you have to justify how that person affected millions of people. But if you choose millions of people, you don’t have to justify it to anyone.”

That seems like a cope-out to me. And I can think of at least four categories of people who are not winners, just yet:

1) Those who are computer/internet illiterate;
2) Those who have no access to computers;
3) Those who have no or have been denied access to the Internet; and
4) Those whose Internet coverage has been filtered (here I’m not referring to the sexually explicit web sites).

So what about these people, which are left out through no fault (at least directly) of theirs? Surely they have no cause to celebrate, and might not even know of this award, being consumed in fending off numerous threats to their very existence.

Being a blogger myself, I certainly feel blessed to have the “time” and the “energy” and the “passion” to “blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or” the tropical fruit offering at the newly upgraded SweetBay (from Kash n’ Karry) down the street. But perhaps the adulation went a bit too far with being given credit for “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.”

There are bloggers, and then there are bloggers. Not all bloggers are born, nurtured, and contributed alike. Certainly to “genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them” is miles apart from “founding and framing the new digital democracy”. But I would grant, perhaps grudgingly, that it's a start.

The Time website has a collection of blogs about the award (13,789 at last count) and I've only read the first few. But if those are any indication, then my view is in the absolute minority, with another one arguing for Warren Buffett for his donations "to focus on world health, fighting diseases as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis and on improving U.S. libraries and high schools."

So go ahead and bask in the glory. But remember much much more need to be done.