moot

So TIME has unleashed a poll onto the internet asking people to vote for the most influential people. (This isn't going to be the winner of "person of the year" mind you)

The founder of 4chan is currently winning (by a million votes at the time of this entry).

At first I was suitably shocked/disgusted at watching the /b-tards run amok on Time, and then I knowingly shook my head knowing what else would you expect from an internet poll. However, looking at the top 10 I'm not as disappointed as I thought I'd be.

Top 10:

1)moot (4chan founder)
2)Rain (Korean singer...their "Justin Timberlake" apparently and sworn enemy of Stephen Colbert)
3) Ron Paul (Ineffective political whargarbl)
4) Jon Stewart (comedian/media satirist)
5) Stephen Colbert (not as good satirist)
6) T-Pain (some producer who invented autotune to fix bad singers)
7) Morgan Tsvangirai (Ineffective opponent of Robert Mugabe about to lose his non-existant voice in Zimbabwe govt)
8) Britney Spears (has she even released an album in the last few years?)
9) Vladimir Putin (scary ass Russian KGB agent running the govt. beyond his term)
10) Arnold Schwarzenegger (yeah, the governator)

Putin is the only serious globally influential person here, Tsvangirai is really a helpless and useless voice that is ignored internationally and internally. Uhm yeah...

Jon Stewart is a semi-legitimate choice because he does occasionally put the media over the barrel and chastise them. Likewise for a significant percentage of youth do rely on the Daily Show as a source for their news intake, which is certainly a significant contribution (if not an indication of the sad level of the informed status of American youth).

It's clear that an online poll is going to skew towards the internet using audience, and going to over represent the younger and more affluent aspects of society. So who is influential to that demographic?

4chan is the originator of many many internet memes that I love dearly. Likewise it's boards do function as a true democracy (in the Greek assembly model, not our representative model). Certainly it is a bit...uhm...perverse, but that is to be expected as it is only moderated in the very slightest (removing child porn, everything else is okay). So it's kind of a wild west, but it does allow for moments of brilliance as the "collective consciousness" of the internet goes to work chasing out ideas.

Also it has porn.

So both as an example of what the internet "is," and for influencing the culture of the internet (by generating a good deal of it) there are actually worse selections among the top 10 for who actually influences the people polled...