TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year

theodp writes "Sorry, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates — there's a new geek kid in town. TIME magazine has selected Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as its Person of the Year. Why? 'For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives,' reasoned TIME At age 26, Zuckerberg is TIME's second-youngest selection, bested only by Charles Lindbergh. So what does Zuckerberg do for an encore — Academy Award, maybe?"

Comments

orly?

[Anonymous Coward]

more like douche-bag of the year.

Thoughts on the article...

[ideonexus]

This article had its ups and downs, mostly downs. From the article:

"There are other people who can write code as well as Zuckerberg — not many, but some —"

If the Time profile of Zuckerberg is acurate, then I think even he would be offended by this statement.

"Websites entreat you to log onto them using your Facebook ID — the New York Times does, and so do Myspace and YouTube."

Hmmm... So does Time. Great job on the full disclosure principle there.

"Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you."

Right, because all World Wide Web content is produced by robots.

Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family, or a college dorm, or an office where your co-workers are also your best friends.

It'll be a wonderful land of lollypops and puppies and kittens! Privacy concerns? No worries:

"If "liking" an ad the same way you "like" a news article or a photo of your spouse seems creepy to you — it's more or less the definition of what Marx called commodity fetishism — you don't have to do it."

If you have privacy concerns, then GO BACK TO YOUR COLD LONELY INTERNET COMMIE!!!

"Zuckerberg has a talent for understanding how people work, but one urge, the urge to conceal, seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favor of sharing. That is, after all, what Facebook is for."

Facebook isn't leaking your personal information to make money, they're doing it because they genuinely misunderstand why people need to keep some things private. Why do you have a problem with this? What's wrong with you? Do you have some secret perverse sexual fetish? Are you performing criminal activities? When did you stop beating your wife?

I did like this thoughtful paragraph:

But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic aquarium we're collectively building is that there actually are good reasons to want to hide things. Just because you present a different face to your co-workers and your family doesn't mean you're leading a double life. That's just normal social functioning, psychology as usual. Identity isn't a simple thing; it's complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a little, the way a skyscraper does in a high wind, and your Facebook profile isn't built to flex.

But then it goes to the other extreme of The Social Network's Gonna make you demented:

An article published earlier this year in European Psychiatry presented the case of a woman who lost her job to a Facebook addiction, and the authors suggested that it could become an actual diagnosable ailment... Facebook is supposed to build empathy, but since 2000, Americans have scored higher and higher on psychological tests designed to detect narcissism, and psychologists have suggested a link to social networking.

I do totally dig this quote, which applies to other online services as well:

Now Facebook is the bottle, and we're the genie. How small are we willing to make ourselves to fit inside?

The article was all over the place, but it does give me a more favorable opinion of Zuckerberg, a less favorable opinion of Facebook and Time, lots of concerns about adapting myself to the social network instead of it adapting to me, and now, if you'll excuse me, I must go break this comment down into 50+ tweets.

Re:Thoughts on the article...

[betterunixthanunix]

Like it or not, it stretches farther and wider than Usenet, IRC, text MMOs, and just about every communication medium that came before it (the exception perhaps being email) ever could.

Funny, there is one medium that has always been more popular than Facebook...if I remember correctly, it is called "The Internet," and it was around years before Facebook ever debuted. I seem to remember that network connecting billions of people around the world, and Facebook simply being one of the ways in which people use the Internet to connect to each other.

Re:Thoughts on the article...

[jeffmeden]

Funny, there is one medium that has always been more popular than Facebook...if I remember correctly, it is called "The Internet," and it was around years before Facebook ever debuted. I seem to remember that network connecting billions of people around the world, and Facebook simply being one of the ways in which people use the Internet to connect to each other.

Double funny. I sure did enjoy the days of yesteryear when, while browsing altavista.com, I was able to communicate directly with billions of other people...

Oh wait, that's not how it worked. The WWW was a conversation between you and the server. You sure have to stretch things a long way to insist that by virtue of viewing the same piece of HTML that you were somehow "connected" to everyone else who was looking at it too. That's like saying a library is a great way to meet people. Yes, there you will meet lots of people, who wish you would shut up so they could get back to reading. Notice a difference between that model, and Facebook? People are now empowered at a scale *never before seen* to communicate directly with each other.

Julian Assange

[Weezul]

It obviously should have been Julian Assange, duh.

Re:Julian Assange

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Any possibility that it was "suggested" to Time that Assange not be selected?

Re:Julian Assange

[characterZer0]

Probably by the advertisers. Time selects the Person of the Year based on how much advertising money they can get for the issue, not based on the person's impact on the world. Advertisers want theirs ads opposite stories about stuff people like, not opposite stories about exposing how corrupt governments are.

For Better or *for Worse* ...

[eldavojohn]

more like douche-bag of the year.

Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Examples:

1938 Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler
1939 Soviet Union Joseph Stalin
1979 Iran Ayatollah Khomeini
2010 United States Mark Zuckerberg

Re:For Better or *for Worse* ...

[Anonymous Coward]

more like douche-bag of the year.

Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Examples:

1938 Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler

1939 Soviet Union Joseph Stalin

1979 Iran Ayatollah Khomeini

2010 United States Mark Zuckerberg

For seriously? A) way to Godwin on the third post of the thread, B) you must be on some kind of awesome drugs to say the Mark Zuckerberg is on the same level as Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, C) Zuckerberg hasn't killed a single human being; let alone 52 million Soviets, or 6 million Jews, nor has he supported the persecution and murder of numerous Islamic sects that worship Allah differently than the Ayatollah.

Also, didn't Zuck just promise to become a philanthropist and give half his money away? WTF Eldavojohn? You mad? Why you mad? STFU and go back to IRC with this bullshit.

Re:For Better or *for Worse* ...

[TheRaven64]

Stalin was Man of the Year (it didn't become Person of the Year until 1999) twice - once in 1939 and then again in 1942. George W. Bush was person of the year in 2000 - read into that what you will (Obama was in 2008). It's interesting that, over the last 15 years, only two have not been US citizens: Vladimir Putin and 'you'. Before 1995, the country of origin was rarely the same two years in a row. I'm not sure if this means that Time is becoming more parochial, or that they honestly believe that no one outside the USA is that influential anymore.

Re:For Better or *for Worse* ...

[paiute]

That one's so much funnier with two bullets and three persons in the room (the answer is the same).

I managed to screw up my own joke.

Re:For Better or *for Worse* ...

[RazorSharp]

If you don't like Facebook, don't use it.

I had to install a browser plug in to prevent my computer from using it against my will. When did NOT doing something become an active process?

TIME shows how irrelevant it has become.

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like "The Oscars" and "Playboy", TIME is an old business shaped around an old business model that is drawing its last few breaths. So hey let's name a new-kid-billionaire as Person of the Year instead of someone that has done something - that'll draw new business in!

Times Magazine windows Coward Of The Year award

[MouseR]

For being too pussy to admit Assange has had greater impact, as noted by the reader vote.

Zuckerberg over Assange?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Wow. What a bunch of shallow, narcissistic twats voted this shite poll.

Really? For re-inventing the BBS?

[tekrat]

Listen, I could understand if Edison was man of the year for inventing the light-bulb... But, if twenty years later, everyone had forgotten about it, and then suddenly, some other dude re-invents the lgihtbulb, and is made "man of the year", then TIME clearly has no actual journalists left and their ability to do in-depth analysis is out the window.

And this is the case with Zuckerberg. All he has done is re-package the BBS into a web-based app. The back-end to Facebook could be Citadel, for all we know. Hell, Softarc's "First-Class" BBS/groupware product had a web-based front end before there was a Facebook. It's all been done before, it's just that this time around, this particular idiot was in the right place at the right time. He got rich, and thousands of other Sysops didn't.

Heck, for a while it appeared that Myspace was going to trounce Facebook. I'd say, rather than make Zuckerberg "man of the year" make Zuckerberg's PR Agent "Man of the Year" -- *That's* the guy that worked harder than anyone.