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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?"

28 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 anshulajain · · Score: 4, Funny

      more like douche-bag of the year.

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

    3. 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 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. 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 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
  4. 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?

  5. 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 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
    3. 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
    4. 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."
  6. Big Deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I won it in 2006.

  7. 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
  8. Breaking news by dsavi · · Score: 4, Funny

    Today Time Magazine announced the Person of the Year 2007.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.