In the winter of 2006, when the chestnuts in Manhattan had long shed their leaves and the December wind whipped around Time-Life’s modernist fortress, an unusual meeting was taking place. The annual ritual of selecting Time’s Person of the Year—that curious American tradition of crowning the year’s most influential figure—was reaching its culmination. But this year would be different. In place of the usual portraits of presidents and potentates, revolutionaries and reformers, the editorial board had chosen something unprecedented: a mirror.
It was, perhaps, inevitable. The world had been shifting beneath our feet, as surely as the tectonic plates that shape our continents. The great institutions of the twentieth century—those bastions of information and influence—were being quietly undermined not by any grand revolution, but by millions of small acts of creation. A teenager in Toledo could reach an audience larger than most newspapers. A grandmother in Gujarat could share her recipes with eager followers in Guatemala. The boundaries between creator and consumer, expert and amateur, had begun to blur like watercolors in the rain.
I remember that year clearly, for it marked a curious intersection in human history. MySpace—that digital equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom wall—still reigned supreme in the social sphere. YouTube, barely a year old, had just been acquired by Google for a sum that seemed astronomical then: $1.65 billion. (How quaint that figure seems now, like coming across an old receipt for a penny farthing.) Facebook was still confined largely to university campuses, though its ambitions, like its founder’s, were growing by the day.
The choice of “You” as Person of the Year was met with the sort of reaction that greets any departure from tradition: a mixture of derision and delight, skepticism and celebration. The old guard, those custodians of cultural heritage, saw it as a capitulation to populist forces, a betrayal of the magazine’s august tradition. “What next?” they seemed to ask, “Shall we give Pulitzers to grocery lists?”
But Time’s editor, Richard Stengel, understood something fundamental about the moment we were living through. In language that managed to be both grandiose and precise, he declared that the award was for “seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy.” Democracy—that grand experiment in collective wisdom—had found a new frontier in the digital realm.
The mirror on the cover was clever, certainly, but it was more than mere cleverness. It reflected a truth about our changing relationship with information and influence. Like the mirrors in ancient temples that were said to trap and redirect divine light, this one captured and reflected back our own power to shape the world.
Consider the events of that year: A senator’s career imploded because of a single recorded word (“macaca”), captured not by the professional press but by an amateur with a camera. The execution of Saddam Hussein, that grim spectacle of state power, reached the world not through official channels but through a grainy cell phone video. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan shared their stories not through dispatches approved by military censors, but through personal blogs that painted war in colors both more vivid and more mundane than any official account.
A decade and a half has passed since that winter decision in Manhattan. The world it heralded has grown both brighter and darker than we imagined. The tools of creation and connection have multiplied beyond counting, like stars appearing in a darkening sky. Social media empires have risen and fallen. Influencers have become an industry. Cryptocurrencies have emerged from the digital ether, promising new forms of value and trust.
Yet the fundamental truth that Time recognized remains: the power to shape our world has become distributed, like light through a prism, into millions of individual hands. We are all, in some small way, authors of our collective story.
Looking at that mirrored cover now, it seems less like a clever gimmick and more like a prophecy fulfilled. We have indeed become the heroes of our own story, for better or worse. Every tweet, every post, every shared moment contributes to the vast tapestry of our digital age. We are all, as Time suggested, persons of the year—not just in 2006, but in every year since.
The mirror reflects still, though now it has multiplied into billions of screens, each one a window through which we view and shape our world. Perhaps that is the true legacy of Time’s choice: not just recognizing a moment of change, but anticipating the world it would create—a world where every voice has the potential to echo across the digital commons, where influence flows not from the top down but from the edges inward, like ripples in a pond.
In the end, Time’s choice was both an acknowledgment and a challenge. It acknowledged the power we had collectively seized and challenged us to use it wisely. As we continue to navigate this digital democracy of our own making, that challenge remains as relevant as ever. For in naming “You” as Person of the Year, Time wasn’t just recognizing what we had become—it was asking what we would choose to be.