Both George Will and Frank Rich (the latter alas, behind the TimesSelect wall) – among the preeminent pundits on the right and the left in America – have treated us to their ruminations on the Internet in the past week, specifically the Time cover story naming “you” the magazine’s Person of the Year.

It’s always easy to mock a newsmagazine for yet another goofy trend story, and Time’s is exactly that. But in this case each pundit seizes on the story as an example of social ills that simply don’t exist.

Rich’s message is that we’re retreating into navel-gazing in the virtual world to escape, like the president, from the harsh reality of Iraq:

As of Friday morning, “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” had been viewed 1,041,776 times by YouTube’s visitors. The count for YouTube video clips tagged with “Iraq” was 22,783. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But compulsive blogging and free soft-core porn are not, as Time would have it, indications of how much you, I and that glassy-eyed teenage boy hiding in his bedroom are in control of the Information Age. They are indicators instead of how eager we are to flee from brutal real-world information that makes us depressed and angry. This was the year Americans escaped as often as they could into their private pleasure pods. So the Person of 2006 was indeed you — yes, you.

First of all, Rich shows just how clueless he (or his assistant) is about YouTube. This appears to be the clip he is referencing. It’s a joke – on people who skim YouTube looking for this type of thing. The clip consists of a photo of a cat with the question “EXCUSE ME WTF RU DOIN” superimposed while music plays for 29 seconds. Midway through if flashes a blurry photo of Britney on the beach in a bikini. There’s a similar one, Britney’s Skirt Flies Up, also with more than a million views.

(If I’m wrong, and there is a real “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” on YouTube with over a million hits, please let me know.)

I take Rich’s obvious point is that there is a lot of trash on YouTube. But you don’t have to be a statistician or sociologist to see through his meaningless comparison with Iraq – especially as that country is agonizingly coming apart, while Britney is leaving her underwear at home. So Americans – and people the world over – love trashy celebrity gossip and fluff. That was true this year, five years ago, thirty years ago, a century ago. Which has the bigger circulation, the National Enquirer or the New York Times? Which has more viewers, “Dancing with the Stars” or “Newshour”? Is that bad? Maybe. But it has nothing to do with the Internet or Iraq.

Will’s complaint is essentially the same as Rich’s – that Americans have self-indulgently disappeared into their online pursuits. Only he pins it not on Iraq, but on liberal relativism. To Will, the Time story is a cave-in to philistinism and the self-esteem movement. Everybody doing his own thing on the Internet gets a pat on the back, whether it’s crap or not, and most of the time it is. To Will, the Internet is a vast, weedy jungle of mediocrity in which genuine excellence is impossible to find, if it exists at all:

Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, says, “Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger” and “Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack.’” Not exactly.

Franklin’s extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history’s most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing demanding or especially admirable about it, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.

I don’t disagree that out of 100 million bloggers, the vast majority may be writing stuff George Will (or I, or most people) won’t care about. We all know about the excesses, the blogorrhea, the exhibitionism that’s out there. But does Will really believe that’s all there is? My wife, for example, maintains two blogs, one about our kids, the other about her various medical travails. The only people reading them are our family and friends. But are they mediocre, self-indulgent? No. And if there are 100 million blogs, if only 1 percent of them don’t suck, and 1 percent of those are excellent, and 1 percent of those are works of true, George Will-approved genius, that’s 100 “genius” blogs. There’s got to be a Paine or a Franklin in there somewhere.

We expect Will to be frowning on popular culture in general, and Internet culture in particular. But Rich is a pop culture maven who delights in limning the latest, zeitgeisty developments for their political significance. But in his column he too seems to have missed the obvious – heck, if Time magazine can identify a trend, why can’t these guys?

I won’t go into it – just read the NewAssignment site – but both Will and Rich ignore what, at this point, are obvious innovations of the Internet, the things “you” never had before: the ability to link, to share, to swarm, to generate interesting conversations, whether it’s about your neighborhood or Bush administration policy. These things make online discourse different from pamphleteering – or column-writing. We are only beginning to see their political, economic, and social effects, but they will be big.

Strangely, both pundits reach to pin a single label on American mass culture. But technology and the mounting array of choices mean the American public is ever less unified in its cultural obsessions, and more fragmented into discrete communities of common interests. (Of course, there is consensus on some things, including dissatisfaction with the Iraq war – which is why so many people left their laptops for the voting booths last month.)

Usually, I like both Rich and Will. They both had Iraq nailed early on, coming at it from different directions. But the kind of obtuse snobbery in these two columns is one reason that the dead tree industry is dying. It’s easy to rag on poor Rick Stengel. But at least he got the basic story right.