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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is Time's 2010 Person of the Year

I like Mark Zuckerberg. I think his story is inspirational. I don't know the truth behind the whole "stealing" of idea, but regardless, I think he implemented the concept in a way no one else had before.
 
Give it to Zuck, he signed up to donate his wealth, his company is the top employer, he site is worth billions and the movie based on him was a hit.

Some others might of been worthy challengers, but Julian isn't one of them. Even if you support the leaks the person who deserves the award would be manning, who is going to jail for life, not some egotistic Aussie.
 
A differing point of view:

Julian Assange, the iconoclastic leader of Wikileaks — currently under house arrest in London for spurious sex charges in Sweden, but also fearing extradition to the American gulag — was the real Person of the Year. He crushed Mark Zuckerberg in an open poll on Time‘s own website, by a margin of 20 to 1. The runner-up was not even Zuckerberg, it was Recep Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, no doubt helped by his strong stand against Israel’s merciless attack of a Gaza aid flotilla. And Zuckerberg? The hyper-capitalist punk was a distant tenth. So much for democracy.

By the way, has anyone here taken the Voight-Kampff test? </ p>
 
It should be pointed out the person that Time selects rarely coincides with the top vote-getter in the Internet poll, so this is not a one-time switch that they made.
 
Someone else also looks askance at Zuckenberg:

Take the vague sycophancy that accompanied Time's announcement. The magazine enthused that Zuckerberg had won the award, 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 live our lives".

I suppose my real objection is that bits of drivel such as the above imply that Facebook is some sort of altruistic social enterprise, when the reality is that it is a very serious and very big American business whose purpose appears to be to open new markets for American products around the world, and of course, make huge profits for its directors. The bored and lonely consumers who find comfort in Facebook chit-chat are pawns in the enterprise, mere targets for commodities.
 
So wait, admiring Zuckenberg is bad because it wasn't an altruistic adventure? I wake up everyday and go to work because I am a self interested person, trying to maximize my utility. Thank god I am because all the other people, those who don't work, have children they cannot afford or otherwise "jerk around", depend on me and the tax revenue I generate.


Zuckenberg created something that allows me to keep in closer contact with friends and family. I can talk with and follow friends of mine from around the world. I think it is easy to say that Facebook has made a contribution to the world. All of this was created because Zuckenberg had a desire to invent something and profit from it. In return, we have all benefited.


Capitalism and the free market. Continually advancing society. God, I love America.
 
Julian Assange is kinda oppressed from the point of Facebook success. All in all, we have 2 choices: 1) To admire a person who has a lot of influence and connection in IT society and can tackle things around easily and 2) To honor man who came up with an idea to invent something revolutionary and actually did but had less power to implement...(Not speaking at all about wikileaks)...So i think definitely Assange deserves more ... People with such ideas often obscure without getting a chance for implementation and someone with no idea and knowledge stealing it can steal your success too...
 
I think Facebook's ability to connect people from all across the world is absolutely incredible.
 
People hate on FB way too much. No one has to join and even if you do join, you can limit what you put on there. I deleted most of the extraneous content a while ago and just us it to keep in touch with people who have moved around.

Yes, email, letters and the phone can do all this, but I have many friends who I do not regularly contact. That doesn't mean I don't care.


I used to be anti-Twitter until I discovered how amazing of a news reader it was.

You have two choices, either embrace the advancement or avoid it. In the end, advancement is going to win out.


I am old enough to remember encyclopedias. They were outdated the second they were printed. Now I have a world of information available to me. I chat with friends around the world, discuss and look up anything imaginable. I can read the latest research, follow the world of finance and news through twitter and see which friends are getting married on facebook. I have gotten interviews, helped friends get interviews and jobs and gotten a job myself, all though linkedin and the other social connectivity avenues.


Turn that frown upside down.
 
Absorbing review of the Facebook phenomenon in the NY Review of Books; some choice excerpts:

The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

Maybe it will be like an intensified version of the Internet I already live in, where ads for dental services stalk me from pillar to post and I am continually urged to buy my own books. Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous. For all these reasons I quit Facebook about two months after I’d joined it. As with all seriously addictive things, giving up proved to be immeasurably harder than starting. I kept changing my mind: Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I’ve ever had, and I loved it for that. I think a lot of people love it for that. Some work-avoidance techniques are onerous in themselves and don’t make time move especially quickly: smoking, eating, calling people up on the phone. With Facebook hours, afternoons, entire days went by without my noticing.

Master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget, which chimes with my own discomfort, while coming from a position of real knowledge and insight, both practical and philosophical. Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues ...

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

In France philosophy seems to come before technology; here in the Anglo-American world we race ahead with technology and hope the ideas will look after themselves. Finally, it’s the idea of Facebook that disappoints. If it were a genuinely interesting interface, built for these genuinely different 2.0 kids to live in, well, that would be something. It’s not that. It’s the wild west of the Internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul.

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.
 
I love when other people write books about why I should or shouldn't like something. People obviously enjoy Facebook. I guess that isn't enough.


"The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing"


I am glad that the author thinks there are only a few ways to keep in contact. That is good for him. Not for me. I suppose that answer isn't good enough for him since he has a desire to tell everyone exactly how they are supposed to communicate.


I have a friend who I worked with at HSBC. She moved away to New Orleans. I regularly check up on here on Facebook and was talking with her last night about something she posted. I plan on visiting her next year and we were discussing schedules. Does this fall into the authors "bare minimum" description? Maybe that is how he operates, but not me.


"forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg"


Sure buddy. Because the site is blue and I am on it, I am "conforming" to Zuckerbergs control. I should "rebel" against him. Or maybe blue is a decent color and I could careless.


I think Reubens are disgusting. I don't eat them. If other people do that is cool. Maybe I should write about about how reubens are nasty and anyone who eats them is buying into a corporate social control mechanism.


Yeah, or maybe I will just mind my business and respect other peoples right to be different.
 
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