[governance] TIME Magazine's Person of the Year (Battle over WHO must be Transparent)

[Paul Lehto]

For both internet and transparency purposes, Time Magazine's Person of
the Year choice, in light of its own Readers' Poll results, is
astounding.

First, Time Magazine's Person of the Year starts with the Time
Readers' Poll -- which is now closed -- and which shows Assange in
first place, easily way ahead of everyone else for Time's 2010 Person
of the Year:

1. Julian Assange                     382,026 votes, and 92% avg
rating (all voters)
2. Recep Tayyip Erdogan          233,639 (avg rating 80%
3. Lady Gaga                          146,378 (avg rating 70%)
4. Jon Stewart and John Colber  78,145, (avg rating 81%)
[snip]
6.  Barack Obama                     27,478 (avg rating 58%)
8.  the Chilean Miners                29,124 (avg rating 47%).
9.  The Unemployed American   19,605 (avg rating 66%)
10. Marc Zuckerberg                  18,353 (avg rating 52%)
[snip]
See http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036,00.html

SO, after the Time Readers' Poll, WHO IS TIME'S PERSON OF THE YEAR?

Well....    There was a "NOTE" attached to the Readers' Poll" to the
direct effect that  "TIME's editors who choose the actual Person of
the Year reserve the right to disagree."

And, boy, did Time editors ever disagree with the people that are
their own readers and customers.

With a publication date of today (December 15, 2010) they chose the
10th place finisher, Marc Zuckerbook of Facebook, who got less than
one vote for every 20.8 votes Assange got from Time Readers' Poll, and
got only about half the positive ranking of Assange  (52% for
Zuckerberg, 92% for Assange).
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2036683,00.html

But, to me, the biggest contrast and biggest shock, bigger than
choosing the 10th place finisher over the first place finisher in the
Readers' Poll, is the stark contrast between #1 Assange and #10
Zuckerberg on WHOSE transparency should get facilitated:

Assange is all about transparency/accountability for the powerful,
while Facebook (while it has other functions) is about transparency
(and necessarily accountability of various kinds) for the average
people.  Facebook for example, is being monitored by US government
officials to gather information and intelligence on its own citizens
in certain contexts.  Things like Facebook make it enormously easier
for the government to monitor aspects of the private lives of netizens
who often innocently think they're sharing just with their "Facebook
friends."

TIME has had Hitler as man of the year decades ago, and routinely
stresses that selection of a Person of the Year isn't a personal
endorsement.

But it is telling, isn't it, that if TIME thinks Zuckerberg's social
media is the wave of the present and of the future, TIME nevertheless
had to resort to grossly undemocratic means to amplify the cause of a
Facebook founder and ignore the overwhelmingly more popular cause of
accountability / transparency for the powerful governments and
corporations in the USA and around the world represented by Assange.

Simply put, the person that has the power to demand or force
transparency on the other person or entity (like government) is the
master, and the one who must yield their privacy pretty much whenever
asked, and must be totally transparent when required is the servant or
slave entity.

Despite the "relevance" of Zuckerberg, I find Time's choice to ignore
its own readers and undemocratically choose Zuckerberg to be chilling
when the type of "transparency" fostered by Facebook is compared to
the type of transparency offered and fostered by Julian Assange and
Wikileaks.

In the Assange/Zuckergerg contrast, the status of ascending masters
and descending slaves is clear.  Unless, of course, Assange continues
to win and decisions like TIME's POY debacle are exposed to a form of
transparency sometimes called robust criticism.

Paul Lehto, J.D.
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