Previously we’ve nominated Donald Rumsfeld and both Jesus Christ and Orko the Magician for Person of the Year. Here’s today’s candidate:

The Blogosphere

When Time Magazine nominated “you” as person of the year, this is what they meant by “you”. It wasn’t the soccer mom glancing over the cover as she reached to pick up her copy of Lucky at the supermarket; it wasn’t the guy behind the checkout, wondering if the money he’ll make this month was going to make ends meet this Christmas; it wasn’t Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Donald Trump. It was the “blogosphere”: a predominantly white, middle class group of people who are rich enough to have broadband at home and worry about breaking their high definition televisions with their Nintendo Wii.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Blogging is an exciting new medium that allows the general public to be published and affords them unprescedented freedom of speech access to information; it’s just, the general public includes people like the poor, and terrorists. Why should we give them a voice?

What a relief to read the latest posts from the most read blogs in the world:

Boing Boing: Japanese game show features food prepared by scantily clad cooks. This is something Rum and Monkey can get behind, but questions have to be asked. Spitting is a major concern, and the Japanese remain unfathomably strange and enigmatic as a nation, but more pressing than that, we worry about distractions from pie. In our world, there can be none. None. Pie.

Gizmodo: Japanese Digitally-Counted Breast Bounce Contest: NSFW and Proof Why We Need the Venice Project. It’s Japanese. There are breasts. This sample, collectively representing the leading lights of the blogosphere, is beginning to suggest that all we care about is Japanese people who wear very little. Cross-referencing with a representative sample of the Rum and Monkey discussion forums, this turns out to be true! Top points to the blogosphere.

Engadget: Nothing says Hannukkah like a menorah sensor bar. Indeed. Except someone saying “hannukkah”, of course.

“The Blogosphere” increasingly refers to a group of people who are taking our hearts and minds away from the awesome potential of the Internet - which is, in fact, reaching out to third world countries and giving a voice to people in many different communities - and turning them back where they should be: that issue of Lucky at the supermarket checkout.

Blogosphere, we salute you!

(Photo by David Sifry, released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The blogosphere also lets you steal things for free.)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 3:40 am and is filed under Bears. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.