Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the remember-when-it-was-you dept.

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?"

52 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. orly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    more like douche-bag of the year.

    1. Re:orly? by Pojut · · Score: 5, Funny

      Just this year?

      --
      Living With a Nerd
    2. Re:orly? by Nikker · · Score: 2

      Hey man he did use wget in his movie that's 1337 enough for me!

      --
      A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
    3. Re:orly? by anshulajain · · Score: 4, Funny

      more like douche-bag of the year.

      http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=Mark_Zuckerberg. Hilarious

    4. Re:orly? by Deep+Esophagus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm still puzzling over the "creating a new system of information" part. I realize that from a marketing perspective, Facebook is ten bajillion times more successful than Friendster, Myspace, etc. but Zuckerberg didn't *create* social networking any more than Al Gore *created* the internet.

  2. Thoughts on the article... by ideonexus · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
    1. Re:Thoughts on the article... by 91degrees · · Score: 2

      It is a little annoying that anyone successful is portrayed as being an all round genius. He had the right combination of tech savvy, business acument and being in the right place at the right time-ness (you might call this "luck", but luck is an underrated skill) to have come up with a killer app.

      Other people came up with more or less the same idea at about the same time and might have been successful were it not for various minor factors that made facebook succeed when others failed.

    2. Re:Thoughts on the article... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    3. Re:Thoughts on the article... by Rogerborg · · Score: 2

      But none of them were ruthless enough to stab their peers in the back and steal their work. I mean, allegedly.

      --
      If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
    4. Re:Thoughts on the article... by paiute · · Score: 2

      He built a better mousetrap. There were tons of others with the same savvy doing the same thing (friendster, myspace, etc) but in the end he won out, BIG time. Yes, you could say he won the lottery... But you had to be an extremely smart, determined individual to even be bestowed a lottery ticket in the first place.

      There is an analogy for this in the financial world: Give a hundred people each a coin and have them flip it. One of these people will flip heads ten times in a row. This person will go on to make a million by writing books and giving seminars about how to successfully flip coins.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  3. Julian Assange by Weezul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It obviously should have been Julian Assange, duh.

    --
    The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
    1. Re:Julian Assange by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --

      Technoli
    2. Re:Julian Assange by Peter+Trepan · · Score: 3, Funny

      It should have been Assange, but Time magazine caved to government pressure! Now we attack! Our forces will go to the newsstands and look at Time magazine thousands of times per second, until there are no photons left for anyone else!

      --

      Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.

    3. Re:Julian Assange by KiloByte · · Score: 5, Informative

      The voting results were:

      1 Julian Assange 92 382024
      2 Recep Tayyip Erdogan 80 233639
      3 Lady Gaga 70 146378
      4 Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert 81 78145
      5 Glenn Beck 28 91746
      6 Barack Obama 58 27478
      7 Steve Jobs 61 24810
      8 The Chilean Miners 47 29124
      9 The Unemployed American 66 19605
      10 Mark Zuckerberg 52 18353

      What's the point in even asking for nominations if you choose some random lowlife anyway?

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    4. Re:Julian Assange by Weezul · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'd rock if he won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace Prize though, obviously those send a far more important message, they are just not as quite as timely. lol

      In any case, wikileaks will "expose an ecosystem of corruption" in a "major U.S. bank" early next year, while presumably continuing to work their way through the U.S. embassy cables. So I'd imagine he'll get another shot. :)

      Amnesty International declare him a prisoner of conscience once more details emerge about the rape accusations.

      --
      The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
    5. Re:Julian Assange by characterZer0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
    6. Re:Julian Assange by Fractal+Dice · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I see Wikileaks and Facebook as the two ends of this generation's tug of war over where power rests in the next phase of the information age. Wikileaks is taking the data of large organizations and putting it in the hands of the public. Facebook is taking the data of details of the public's lives and putting it into the hands of private organizations.

    7. Re:Julian Assange by Jazz-Masta · · Score: 2

      I see Wikileaks and Facebook as the two ends of this generation's tug of war over where power rests in the next phase of the information age. Wikileaks is taking the data of large organizations and putting it in the hands of the public. Facebook is taking the data of details of the public's lives and putting it into the hands of private organizations.

      True, but both are driving towards complete transparency. Facebook is doing to people (on a small level, to their friends) what Wikileaks is doing to corporations. I have seen many people break-up, lose their jobs, or get seriously reprimanded for things found on Facebook.

      Facebook wasn't the first social network, but it was the one that "stuck" with the general public. For that reason, Facebook has changed the way people use the Internet, much like Youtube and Google did in the past. That is why Mark is the person of the year. 2010 was a huge year for social networking - it exploded from teens/young adults and techies, to mainstream, middle-aged and older. Of course, having a movie out about you also keeps things fresh in people's minds. Like many other awards ceremonies, it's usually the last, or freshest movies that win all the awards.

    8. Re:Julian Assange by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative
      Yes, there are a few examples in the past when multiple people have been selected, although not many:
      • 1937: Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling
      • 1968: The Apollo 8 astronauts (William Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell)

      And that's ignoring cases when it's been a group of people, such as:

      • 1950: The American Fighting-Man
      • 1960: US Scientists
      • 1966: The Generation Twenty-Five and Under.
      • 1975: American Women
      • 2006: You
      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    9. Re:Julian Assange by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm not sure that's fair. Assange is important, but he just founded wikileaks, he didn't populate it with content. The editor in chief, the founder etc. of the new york times don't really deserve enormous personal accolades for the pentagon papers. Wikileaks is valuable because it facilitates what journalists should be doing, but the vast majority of what it releases is of no value (by volume), but I'm not sure it's quite fair to make him person of the year. PFC manning, assuming he actually leaked the material maybe. But Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg both don't deserve the accolade for the same reason, they just made a website that other people can upload stuff to. 3 or 4 years from now, someone else could come along with a better way to upload stuff and either of them could be forgotten in a heartbeat.

      Since time does award person of the year to more than just one person, I think a better answer might have been to give it to Wikileaks supporters (use editorial staff to come up with a better name) rather than just Assange, or to Wikileaks as a whole. For showing us that most of what happens in diplomatic meetings is mind numbingly boring and best left unrepeated, but the bad stuff can be very very bad.

    10. Re:Julian Assange by Knuckles · · Score: 2

      Oh, it appears that the TIME poll was just for fun and they chose the guy who came in tenth, http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1911620&cid=34561074

      --
      "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
    11. Re:Julian Assange by Weezul · · Score: 2

      Assange has been the one publicly articulating the philosophy that's finally motivating the leakers like Manning, the unnamed U.S. bank executives who's stuff comes out in January, etc. And he started articulating it long before the wikileaks site was founded.

      --
      The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
  4. Good choice by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Facebook is kinda silly but it did enable me to reconnect with old College & high school mates I've not seen in 10-15 years (since graduation). Good invention.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    1. Re:Good choice by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Informative

      >>>Email

      I didn't know my old classmates' addresses so could not contact them by email. With facebook I can just drag-out the old yearbook and search for real names, or search for people in my graduation year. Also located an old teacher that I liked. (He's retired.)

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  5. Time cops out again by NotInfinitumLabs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They've had a history of choosing a non-controversial candidate over the obvious winner since choosing the Ayatollah back in 1979 caused them to lose subscriptions. Remember when they picked Giulianni over Bin Laden?

  6. For Better or *for Worse* ... by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by Talderas · · Score: 2

      After all. Time magazine basically made it look like Einstein was the brain child that caused the atomic bomb to be created.

      --
      "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
    3. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      Yeah, because whatever he has done with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is definitely on the same level as Hitler, Stalin and Khomeini... Sometimes I think peoples perspectives are screwed here on Slashdot, and its posts like yours that affirm that thought.

    4. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by paiute · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, because whatever he has done with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is definitely on the same level as Hitler, Stalin and Khomeini... Sometimes I think peoples perspectives are screwed here on Slashdot, and its posts like yours that affirm that thought.

      Q. You are in a room with Hitler and Zuckerberg. You have a gun with two bullets. What do you do?

      A. Shoot Zuckerberg twice.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    5. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by moonbender · · Score: 2

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

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    6. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by paiute · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    7. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by DerekLyons · · Score: 2

      That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing over your head... He's not comparing Zuckerberg to Hitler, he's correcting the common misconception that Time's "Man/Person of the Year" is awarded only for positive reasons - when in fact it's awarded for being most influential for weal or for woe.

    8. Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... by RazorSharp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      --
      "From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
  7. TIME shows how irrelevant it has become. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

  8. Re:Hmm... by mibe · · Score: 2

    Would you mind elaborating on that? It sounds like you're saying that Facebook hasn't changed much, which would be ridiculous. What's this whole internets thing anyway? I could buy things before that, couldn't I? And talk to people remotely, and send letters. Yeah it's not the same as saying the internet hasn't changed anything, but it's only because Facebook is part of the internet. Go to any college campus, anywhere, and find someone with a laptop. 999 times out of 1000, that person has Facebook open. If that isn't changing things, what is?

  9. Big Deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I won it in 2006.

  10. Breaking news by dsavi · · Score: 4, Funny

    Today Time Magazine announced the Person of the Year 2007.

  11. Applaud by NuKe_MoNgOoSe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That this man managed to come up with a idea which has set him and any future children he may have for life, I hate the fucker however for bringing about yet another medium which proves how simple people really are between FB and Twitter I know when any of my friends is having a hygeine issue, when they are going to the mall, when their sig other cheats on them, whenever they are having a bad day! Never have I felt closer or more wanting a gun in my entire life. I hate people and you can say this and argue that but it wont sway my opinion that humanity as a whole is a stunted child sitting in a corner chewing on crayons.

    --
    When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
  12. Times Magazine windows Coward Of The Year award by MouseR · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Times Magazine windows Coward Of The Year award by CodeBuster · · Score: 2

      For being too pussy to admit Assange has had greater impact

      Who might indeed have won if hadn't been taken in by some easy pussy. Assange should have known from reading history that using female agents to ensnare unsuspecting male targets is a time honored intelligence agency trick. The East Germans and the Stasi in particular were masters of this sort of operation. It should go without saying to any man in a position of power: beware of easy pussy, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

    2. Re:Times Magazine windows Coward Of The Year award by clone52431 · · Score: 2

      It should go without saying to any man in a position of power: beware of easy pussy, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

      Somebody should tell Tiger Woods.

      --
      Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
  13. Lets ignore privacy and the true facebook owner by zero0ne · · Score: 2

    So we have a company that has no interest in maintaining at least some privacy for its users.

    We also have a company that, as far as I know, is still in the courts regarding ownership.

    Yet, somehow this CEO gets nominated as the person of the year? I wonder how much he had to pay for this.

    This is of course ignoring the fact that he wasn't even in the top 5 of public nominations.

  14. I don't think he changed my life by cats-paw · · Score: 2

    other than the fact that I have to listen to so many people talk about facebook.

    and get off my lawn !

    --
    Absolute statements are never true
  15. There is more to the Internet than HTTP by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 2

    I have fond memories of communicating by email, IM/IRC, etc. It is as if by virtue of being connected to the Internet, you can send an email message to any email address, and it will be received by someone else who is connected to the Internet. Or perhaps you can use a chat system to engage in real time conversations with any other Internet connected user. Or you might even use Facebook.

    Like I said, the invention that really connected billions of the people is the Internet; Facebook is just a way of using the Internet to communicate.

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  16. Zuckerberg over Assange? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:Zuckerberg over Assange? by pjfontillas · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Assange had the majority vote. TIMES reserved the right to choose the winner regardless of the poll outcome.

      --
      Life. Is. Good.
    2. Re:Zuckerberg over Assange? by RDW · · Score: 4, Funny

      Assange probably doesn't know yet:

      http://www.metro.co.uk/news/850389-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-slams-visa-mastercard-and-paypal

      'The only letter to reach him during the week he has spent in the prison's segregation unit was a slip telling him that a copy of Time magazine sent to him had been destroyed as the cover bore his photo, Mr Stephens said...The American news publication pictured Assange on the front with an image of the US stars and stripes flag gagging him.'

      Just to mess with him, the prison should let him have the new issue with everything from this story except the words 'Person of the year' redacted.

    3. Re:Zuckerberg over Assange? by $0.02 · · Score: 2

      Asange made a web site that exposes government dirty laundry.
      Zuck made a web site that exposes your own dirty laundry.

      --
      If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
  17. Really? For re-inventing the BBS? by tekrat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
    1. Re:Really? For re-inventing the BBS? by Kakihara · · Score: 2

      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..."

      From what I can tell you're not joking. Edison didn't invent the lightbulb. Humphry Davey invented the lightbulb in 1809.

      --
      "Has the rule of law degenerated into the rule of lawyers?" (Niall Ferguson)
  18. You know who else was once a Time ...? by mAriuZ · · Score: 2

    Time has apparently named Mark Zuckerberg the "Person of the Year". You know who else was once a Time "Person of the Year"? Hitler, in 1938.

    http://identi.ca/notice/60474367

    --
    developer http://flamerobin.org