Kids These Days, I Tell Ya…
“By the way, I’m aware of the irony of appearing on teevee in order to decry it. So don’t bother pointing that out.” - Sideshow Bob
I can’t be the first person to have made this comparison, but screw it, I’m doing it anyway.
At the end of last year Time magazine declared “You” to be its person of the year. They were widely lampooned for the goofiness of it and rightly so. Seriously, what does “You” even mean in this context? And if it’s about the collective creation of content on-line shouldn’t it have been “Us”? Goofy as it was though, it got more free publicity than any other selection in years, maybe ever. Later this month they’re going to declare a new one, but I’ll bet ten years from now people will remember the “You” year a lot better than any other.
At the moment Time, one of the flagship publications of the, ahem, old media, finds itself in a bit of a spat with many of the Yous they praised last year. Glenn Greenwald has all the gory details and they just keep getting funnier and funnier. To make a long and link filled story short, Time columnist Joe Klein wrote a bad column based around a demonstrably false premise. Having had this pointed out to him he could’ve simply said, “Whoops, my bad” penned a short correction/apology and the whole thing would’ve ended. Instead of doing that eminently sensible thing, he and his editors have raised the castle drawbridge and begun hurling boiling oil over the walls. Time and Klein seem to be convinced that their opinions are facts and that the facts cited by their critics are opinions. That is a dangerous position when anything and everything can and will be scrutinized on-line.
More than anything else, this incident (and the uncountable others like it, past, present and future) resembles that time early in adolescence when a kid realizes that his parents are not omniscient, omnipotent creatures. Parents, and by extension all adults, are merely people, as hypocritical, dishonest and lazy as anyone else. It’s a scary realization, on both sides. It strips the young of the warm-blanket feeling of all encompassing protection. It reminds the old of just how old (and possibly tired) they have become, obsolescence isn’t here yet, but the inevitability of it begins to hit home.
That “You” cover last year, with the tinny reflective material, might as well have been an awkward middle school photo, another haphazard attempt by the elders to frame the young into something familiar.
