• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, December 2, 2013

There is an odd new kind of promotional democracy borne from social media and the data they cast off. It makes for the strangest bedfellow – like ersatz entertainer Miley Cyrus and authoritarian Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Time magazine will announce on Wednesday its annual Person of the Year. But this time around it has recruited Twitter users to voice their opinion of who should get the quickly forgettable distinction of being on Time’s next cover. As always, Time’s final decision will come from its editors, or whatever is left of them. Voting is easy and made for viral ballot stuffing. Just mention a candidate’s name in a tweet with the #Timepoy hashtag and it will be scraped and counted by Time tech partner Poptip. Let the zaniness commence. Or is it so zany?

For much of last week, Miley’s fans successfully dominated the social channel, thrusting the young singer/provocateur way in front of a number of other world figures, who, oddly enough seem to have their own teams of retweeters. The weekend tally has Miley at just over 20% of votes, which also can be cast directly at Time.com. But Erdogan is just a point behind, followed closely by Narenda Modi, a Hindu nationalist candidate in the upcoming Indian election, while four-time Chief Minister of the Gujarat state. Egyptian General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is also in the top tier. Notably, there is a massive falloff from there into low single digit returns for many figures more familiar to U.S. readers, including Pope Francis, Edward Snowden, Wendy Davis and of course Jimmy Fallon. Curiously, Tea Party firebrand Ted Cruz barely hits the radar and is far behind even Nobel short story writer Alice Munro. Even President and 2012 POY designee Barack Obama fares as poorly, with only .5% of the online vote.

With the social media penchant for team viral voting, one is tempted to dismiss such PR stunts by Time as old elite media patronizing another populist trend. After all, why not let the mass voice rally support when it doesn’t really matter in the final judgment? It's hard to recall a more outdated 20^th Century media exercise than Person of the Year. With the authority and relevance of newsweeklies pretty much nil at this point, who the Time editors think was the most newsworthy figure of the year matters to no one except other media that will have something to report on for a few days. Sure, there is a chance that the choice will be provocative enough to spark real discussion. And I am all for a little top-down editorial opinion as an instigator of thoughtful conversation.

But the social sphere has already proven more interesting than just about anything Time has pronounced in the last few years. Miley included, the names and international figures that the Twitter campaign surfaced suggest at the very least pockets of passions I am not sure any editorial board would have exposed to us. Even Miley fans are proving to me that her following runs deeper and broader than the surface personality herself. A lot of the fans voice solidarity with her daring, rebel-girl persona. It is reminiscent of Madonna fandom in the '80s, another case of a singer getting outsized acclaim for the qualities of her celebrity rather than the quality of her talent. The data doesn't reveal the whole story. But it does force us to reassess old presumptions.  

Messy and bizarre as social media may be in the way it curates information, the platform is at the very least a welcome counterpoint, if not replacement, for a preceding century of media that was “mass” only in its distribution, not in its creation.