Time: Person of the Year did ‘more than press “like” on a Facebook page’
The magazine named ‘The Protester’ as the person of 2011. The author of the story explained why.
Then, the decision to choose not a single person, but instead something emblematic of a trend—in that case the trend was social media—is similar to this year’s choice, The Protester, because the generic face of dissent reflects the global spread of revolution and dissent in 2011.
It’s not one person; it’s a movement.
To shed more light on the magazine’s decision, Time managing editor Richard Stengel talked with Kurt Andersen, who wrote the cover piece on the Person of the Year.
Andersen told Stengel:
“Protest has fallen out of fashion as a political tool over the last 20 years … Not only did protest come back in this big, globally contagious way this year, but we are two regimes down and counting. There’s this incredible effect that makes it the biggest deal in more than a century in terms of this global sense of protesting against governments that are perceived as corrupt and ineffectual and consequence flowing from that.”
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