Dear reader: Are you, or have you ever been, a person? If you've answered "yes," then a hearty congratulations to you! You're the recipient of a prestigious honor from one of the most famous and venerable publications in America.
Time Magazine, in the kind of cop-out/"big surprise" that's becoming increasingly common for this award, recently named "You" as its Person of the Year. The cover is a computer screen with that kind of shiny, almost-reflective foil in the middle. You can gaze into it and see your face thrown back at you, distorted, grotesque, nearly unrecognizable.
The rationale, according to the magazine, is that you, Mr. or Ms. Savvy Computer Owner, now "control the Information Age. Welcome to your world."
Frankly, this cover is the most unintentionally brilliant piece of social commentary I've seen in a long time. It gets nearly everything wrong, yet manages to be all the more ingenious for it.
The Information Age apparently officially ended in the early 1990s, depending on which amorphous group of experts you talk to. Even if you don't accept that the Age is over, Time just killed it by putting "you" in charge.
Why so?
Because "you," meaning individual people, don't exclusively possess, control or dispense information. Excepting a very select group of professionals, most people, even most savvy computer users, are not really independently generating or dispersing very much information at all (in the traditional sense of facts, figures and recorded events).
Us smart-ass college kids are no exception. Yes, I can access and analyze information, turn it into Excel spreadsheets or MatLab printouts. I possess skills that make me appear a master of the Information Age. In reality, however, I'm still just manipulating information handed to me by a someone else.
I'm certainly not learning much pure information in class, and I haven't for a long time. Neither have most American students, at any age level. The average high school kid has trouble finding Canada on a map.
We simply don't teach raw information or its retention anymore, and we certainly don't value it very highly. Maybe retention is no longer a viable strategy when confronting the torrent of information we can now access. Maybe Google is just ruining everything.
In any case, the Information Age never really democratized the creation and control of information. Information doesn't have its seat in individuals, it exists elsewhere, and for the most part, those "elsewheres" are the same places they've always been: the university lab, the back issues of newspapers, the archives of businesses and governments. Sure, now you can look at it, sometimes even for free. But that doesn't make it yours.
All that said, I'm not really disputing the gist of the Time article. Don't worry: I think you do deserve its Person of the Year designation, that the individual user of digital tools is increasingly important in the age we inhabit.
I just don't think that this age is based on information anymore. Simply put, what you possess and generate, what most of us are controlling with these incredible electronic devices, is not information but opinion.
The "you" that Time is recognizing is proliferating opinion at an incredible rate, and if our era needs a name, let's christen it the Opinion Age.
All of which goes a long way toward explaining the grand collapse of civility, patience and rationality in the discussion surrounding the Case Which Will Not Be Named. Provost Peter Lange and President Richard Brodhead recently held a Q&A with the Arts and Sciences faculty on this very subject. Ostensibly dealing with issues of "free speech," the meeting was apparently in response to the continued drubbing many professors are receiving from signing the infamous "This is What A Social Disaster Sounds Like" Chronicle ad last spring.
Lange's address at the event, and The Chronicle story about it, are fabulously inconclusive. Lange essentially states that the faculty members are being personally attacked and insulted, often anonymously via message boards and e-mails, and that this is bad, but that sometimes new forms of communication can be good, too.
So basically he says nothing at all.
The whole affair illustrates very clearly that nobody knows what to do now that opinion is out of the bag and run amok-and that the Duke administration would really love if everyone's opinion would just go away entirely.
It was opinion that produced the slanted and needlessly inflammatory "Social Disaster" ad in the first place, and opinion (this time of the ad's critics) that keeps it bouncing around the Internet. There isn't a shred of actual information contained anywhere in the advertisement.
To this day, the vast majority of signatories continue to defend their decision to run it, recently releasing another statement decrying the criticism they've received. The main justification seems to be, unsurprisingly, that they are entitled to their opinion.
Of course.
Opinion is the currency of our time; it's how we talk to each other. Digital tools let us cut information and real confrontation out the picture. Our entire validation rests on opinion. If we apologize, if we back down for a second, that means our opinion was wrong, or alternately, we were wrong to hold that opinion. That's a worse-case scenario. The signatories, the protesters, the pot-bangers-none of them can apologize because opinion is all they have.
The worst critics on the other side are really not much better; most seem to have hopped straight out of time machines from the Red Scare, ready to take down Marxist weenies and make the world safe again for clean-cut American kids. And that's the ultimate allure of the Opinion Age: Any event can mean anything to anybody, we're all entitled to our own opinion and so we can all be the tragic hero we so desperately want to be.
Here in America, with the Internet as our guide, the computer our compass, everything's the truth.
That's why I love that Time cover. I can see myself in that computer screen, made faceless, vaguely monstrous, vaguely threatening. When I run the electronic gauntlet to spew my opinion out on an anonymous world, that's what I become. At the same time, that's what you become to me.
That's you. Welcome to your world.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday.
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