The Wednesday Weigh-In: “Protester of the Year” Edition

Time magazine has named the “collective protester around the world” as its person of the year. The magazine goes on the newsstands Friday, and interestingly, amazingly, beautifully, the  cover photo is of a female Arab protester.

I’m thrilled to see the Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent, related protests around the world including Occupy Wall Street, honored and acknowledged in this way. It’s so rare for the grassroots origins of social change to be celebrated in large, powerful media spaces like this. And the street protesters of today deserve it!! They are working so hard, and sacrificing so much, in the name of social change.

Time managing editor Richard Stengel seemed to agree in an interview he gave to NBC on the selection.

There’s this contagion of protest,” he said. “These are folks who are changing history already and they will change history in the future.

I’m also sort of fascinated with and maybe a little curious about the decision to honor the anonymous protester, rather than naming a specific, tangible one, who has done something concrete. I get that it’s hard to single out just one protester out of the hundreds of thousands that have emerged as local leaders and grassroots change-makers. And I’m not saying I disagree with what they’ve done.

But it still feels like a slight copout to make the protester nameless, generic, when there are so many real-life, highly identifiable protesters out there doing real work. Maybe copout is too strong of a word. I still feel like the overall effect of the choice positive.

People who work on social change are pretty consistently portrayed as selfless, or pressured to remain anonymous to keep the spotlight off them and on their work. But the truth is that what they’re doing is work, and they deserve as much credit as someone who is choosing to do their work in another sphere, like social media. Why should Mark Zuckerburg get true, high-profile glory, while protesters get a generic, symbolic nod?

I haven’t seen the story to accompany the piece, and maybe it names some specific protesters. At the end of the day, I know that this is more of a creative editorial idea than some deeply symbolic gesture towards systematic invalidation of the work behind social change.

Which brings me to this week’s Wednesday Weigh-In.

What do you think of Time Magazine’s selection for Person of the Year? If it were up to you, who would your singular, real-life pick for “protester of the year” be?

For more reactions to the decision, check out Time’s “6 Basic Twitter Reactions”.