If you have not read Time Magazine‘s recent "Person of the Year: You" piece, I urge you to get it. It uses Big Words, Bigger Words than I have heard in a long time about anything, technology or otherwise. It is about the fundamental change in the fabric of our society that is caused by individuals empowering themselves through technology, and so You beat out Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Rumsfeld, al-Sadr, the new Pope and many other people who clearly mattered in 2006. Listen to this:

It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes….

We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy…

And here it comes: (emphasis is mine)

… for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

…[it] is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

I absolutely agree. However, before it happened it would have been inconceivable to me that a mainstream publication like Time goes out on a limb — which is what it is, from a mainstream perspective — and uses such Big Words. Times are a-changin’, and dramatically and irreversibly so. One wonders (shudders?) what Time will write when our children are the same age as we are now.