Category: Society & Economics Key figures: Richard Stengel (Time editor), Lev Grossman (Time technology writer, author of the cover story)
Summary
On December 16, 2006, Time magazine announced that its Person of the Year for 2006 was “You” — the collective of internet users who were creating, sharing, and distributing content at unprecedented scale through platforms such as YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace, and the broader blogosphere. The selection appeared in the magazine’s December 25, 2006 / January 1, 2007 double issue. In place of a portrait of an individual, the cover featured a Mylar mirror panel on a representation of a personal computer monitor, so that readers would literally see themselves reflected in it.
Time editor Richard Stengel explained the choice: the magazine placed a mirror on the cover “because it literally reflects the idea that you, not us, are transforming the information age.” Time’s technology writer Lev Grossman authored the accompanying cover essay, declaring that the honoree had seized “the reins of the global media, founding and framing the new digital democracy, and working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”
The Web 2.0 Backdrop
The Platforms Behind the Decision
Time’s editors cited a specific constellation of 2006 phenomena to justify the selection:
- YouTube: By the time Google acquired it for $1.65 billion in October 2006 (see Google Acquires YouTube), the platform was receiving 100 million video views per day, virtually all from user-uploaded content. The scale was without precedent in media history.
- Wikipedia: By December 2006 the English-language Wikipedia contained approximately 1.5 million articles, written and maintained entirely by volunteer editors — a knowledge resource surpassing in size any prior encyclopedia produced by paid professionals.
- MySpace: At its peak traffic in 2006, MySpace was the most visited website in the United States, surpassing Google in June 2006, with over 100 million registered accounts. Users built personal pages, uploaded music, and connected with peers using HTML and CSS they had learned themselves.
- Blogging: The blogosphere had grown from fewer than 100,000 blogs in 2003 to an estimated 57 million by 2006, per Technorati’s tracking. Blogs had proven their news-breaking capacity during events including the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina response, and numerous political stories that traditional media had initially ignored or underreported.
- Twitter: Launched in July 2006 (see Launch of Twitter), Twitter had roughly 50,000 users by year end — small at the moment of the Time selection, but already exemplifying the real-time public-status-update paradigm.
The Term “Web 2.0” in 2006
The Time selection coincided with the peak use of the term “Web 2.0,” coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly and web designer Darcy DiNucci but popularised by the O’Reilly Media “Web 2.0 Conference” held annually from 2004. By 2006 the term had become mainstream shorthand for the second-generation internet — characterised by user participation, social networking, tagging, remixing, and “the web as platform.” Time’s decision can be read as the moment mainstream media formally accepted this framework.
Reception and Criticism
Praise
Many media critics and technology observers praised the selection as perceptive and bold. The Mylar-mirror cover mechanism was widely admired as an elegant editorial solution to the problem of depicting a collective. Technology publications including Wired and CNET praised the decision as accurately capturing the year’s defining story.
Defenders of the choice noted that Time had previously selected collective honorees: in 1966 the magazine named “Twenty-Five and Under” (the Baby Boom generation), and in 1988 it selected “The Endangered Earth,” a non-person, as its Planet of the Year.
Criticism
Several commentators argued the selection was an evasion — a way to flatter readers rather than make a genuine editorial choice. Washington Post television critic Tom Shales called it “a cop-out.” Others pointed out that Time had been struggling with declining circulation (the magazine lost roughly 300,000 print subscribers between 2004 and 2006) and suggested the selection was designed to curry goodwill with an internet audience the magazine needed.
More substantive critiques focused on whether “user-generated content” represented a real shift in power or simply a new distribution mechanism controlled by corporations: YouTube was owned by Google; MySpace was owned by News Corp (which had acquired it for $580 million in 2005); Wikipedia operated as a nonprofit, but the servers and governance remained concentrated among a small group. Critics argued that “You” actually meant “the platforms that profited from your free labor.”
Significance
The selection formally acknowledged, at the level of mainstream media, the structural shift from passive media consumption to active content creation that the Web 2.0 generation of platforms had enabled. By placing an ordinary user rather than a political leader, scientist, or executive on its cover, Time registered that the most consequential force reshaping public life was participatory digital culture itself — a judgment that subsequent years validated as social media became a dominant feature of global communication, geopolitics, and commerce.
In hindsight the selection was also prescient about darker dimensions: the same participatory infrastructure that enabled Wikipedia’s volunteer knowledge production and YouTube’s creative economy also enabled the spread of misinformation, coordinated harassment, and political manipulation that became defining concerns of the 2010s. The “You” who was Time’s Person of the Year in 2006 would become, in subsequent years, the subject of intense debate about algorithmic amplification, data privacy, and platform accountability — developments that the magazine’s congratulatory framing could not yet anticipate.