R U really POTY?

I am in two minds about Time magazine's decision to make "you" its Person of the Year. On the one hand I am delighted that a traditional magazine is trumpeting the arrival (nay, overnight dominance) of media based on consumer-generated content, and is acknowledging that so-called prosumers are an important factor in the economy and society. And it's a great ploy to get free publicity. Cuteness sells. Bravo.

On the other hand, it's a cop-out, and an inaccurate one at that. The whole point of POTY was to explore the impact that a specific individual has had on the world over the past twelve months, typically the person who had hogged the media most. And while the award in the past tended to go to someone deserving of role-model status, Time has sometimes acknowledged that bad guys also have huge global impacts.

But to declare that "you" are the person of the year is stretching a point. Firstly, the whole notion is falsely based on the idea that all Time's readers are internet users, and that they also post content online. Er, OK, perhaps Time has readership studies to back up that one, but I doubt it -- the thrust of the editorial is that we all are persons of the year, whether we read Time or not, because we all contribute to online content and communities.

In a typically American moment of self-referential stereotyping, Time manages to disrespect the majority of the world's population. True, YouTube and other forms of social media are wickedly popular in America, as they are in the Far East, but they are unlikely to find a place in the world's history books. There's a presumption that prosumption is impacting the world more significantly than, say, medical research, genetic engineering, religion or politics.

Well maybe it is, if your world is the world of traditional media. In the past couple of years the single biggest agent of change in the publishing industry has been citizen journalism, mainly in the form of blogging and photo/video posting. Bloggers with no editorial oversight or journalistic training have sucked away big audiences from career journalists, forcing traditional media to launch their own blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds, and causing celebrity hacks to work a great deal harder. I recall haranguing MSNBC's Chris Matthews during the US presidential elections two years ago because though he had actually started blogging he did not have an RSS feed. Today, TV journalists plug their blogs on air like they used to plug their books, and seem to be as interested in their Technorati rankings as they are in their Nielsen ratings.

The impacts of prosumption are also being felt in the movie, music, and stock photo businesses, all of which are having to rethink their business models. And of course marketing and PR, never at the forefront of innovation, have started trying to figure out how best to reinvent themselves to exploit changing consumer data-acquisition behaviours.

Will the ripple effects wash over all of us in one way or another, whether we are active social computing users in a G5 nation or not? They probably will, because you can't tweak information flows without also tweaking corporate or organisational cultures. An online customer is an informed customer; a networked online customer is an empowered customer; and an empowered customer cannot be abused by vendors. Large organisations are unable to fragment themselves to provide one level of service to the sophisticated user of technology and a completely different level of service to all others. And since the sophisticated user of technology probably has more spending power than other customers, businesses have to change in order to earn and keep their loyalty. Everybody benefits.

So maybe the career journalists at Time are on to something after all. We unschooled bloggers had better watch our backs.