Sunday, December 17, 2006
MYLAR GENERATION
Besides the general wussiness and behind-the-curvedness of Time’s Person of the Year selection, there’s a kind of obvious conceptual flaw:
Here’s Time managing editor Rick Stengel:
We chose to put a mirror on the cover because it literally reflects the idea that you, not we, are transforming the information age. The 2006 Person of the Year issue—the largest one Time has ever printed—marks the first time we’ve put reflective Mylar on the cover. When we found a supplier in Minnesota, we made the company sign a confidentiality agreement before placing an order for 6,965,000 pieces. That’s a lot of Mylar.
Thing is, Rick, what you’ve got here is a cover celebrating the information age—but it only works in print. Apparently this was “unanticipated”:
Designing a cover with a Mylar window does create one unanticipated challenge: How do you display it online when there’s no one standing in front of it? If you go to Time.com, you’ll see an animated version of the cover in which the window is stocked with a rotating display of reader-submitted photos. Maybe you’ll see yourself.
Mylar was invented in the early ’50s.
UPDATE. Paco asks: “What happens if somebody leaves the book lying around the zoo and a chimp picks it up. Isn’t he likely to get above himself, maybe start putting on airs around his fellows?”