If you hadn't heard yet, Time's Person of the Year is...well...You. The thrust of their argument is that New Media is user-generated media, and sites like blogs, MySpace, and YouTube are changing the way that we create and distribute information. It has a totally tacky mirror on the front cover so that you can see yourself.

George Will wrote an editorial where he takes issue with the self-absorbed silliness of this choice. While I am inclined to agree on some points -- frankly it strikes me as the choice you make when you don't really want to make a choice -- he makes (or rather questions) an analogy that is off base.

For Time's part they state:

Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, says, ``Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger'' and ``Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, 'Poor Richard's Almanack.'''

Will takes issue with this analogy:

Franklin's extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history's most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves, for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but nothing demanding or especially admirable, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 76 percent of bloggers say one reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others. And 37 percent -- soon, 37 million -- say the primary topic of their blog is ``my life and experiences.'' George III would have preferred dealing with 100 million bloggers rather than one Paine.

True, I don't read that many people out there that have either the drive or the quality of Franklin or Paine, but Will is looking back with the benefit of hindsight. The 18th century was a century filled with writers and pamphleteers. Franklin and Paine made it down to the present day because they were the best of the bunch and the most salient to the events that actually occured, but for each of them there are thousands of others who won't be remembered. They weren't particularly articulate or the novelty of their ideas simply wasn't recognized.

Most American's remember who wrote the Federalist Papers, but do you remember who wrote the Anti-Federalist Papers? (And Patrick Henry is a cheap answer because he was famous for other reasons.)

Hell, Shakespeare wasn't entirely revived at the Bard until three centuries after his death.

It is unfair to judge contemporary bloggers without the benefit of hindsight. Surely there are many, many more bloggers, but I assert that amidst the total drivel Time's statement is fundamentally correct: there are some who will change the world.

This last statement by Will, I also take issue with:

There are, however, essentially no reins on the Web -- few means of control and direction. That is good, but vitiates the idea that the Web's chaos of entertainment, solipsism and occasional intellectual seriousness and civic engagement is anything like a polity (a ``digital democracy"). Time's bow to the amateurs who are, it strangely suggests, no longer obscure, and in the same game that Time is in, is refuted by a glance -- which is all an adult will want -- at YouTube's most popular videos. (Emphasis mine.)

It's chaotic. So what? Polities usually are. It's got a bunch of trash in it. So what? Polities always do.

The suggestion that in the absence of control you can't have a stable polity is ridiculous on its face. In what way is that different than American culture as a whole? The suggestion that all material need necessarily be of quality to make a positive judgment about it is also ridiculous. What other types of media are we judging by that standard?

I have a problem with people who want the Web to be either moral or immoral -- to be consistently greater or lesser than the outside world. It doesn't work that way. The Web is amoral. It is many and various and horrifyingly inconsistent. It is neither superior or inferior to what people put into it, and what people are putting into it is everything in the outside world. Yes, that is terribly chaotic, often ridiculous, and results in an insane amount of useless crap. If you think about it, so does nearly everything else people do.

Citing examples -- or even a majority -- of things not worth reading or viewing cannot condemn the New Media because it isn't about the whole. Like most complex systems the parts matter -- the parts have meaning -- and Will is totally missing that.