CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has been named Person of the Year by Time Magazine. This decision comes despite the fact that Assange of WikiLeaks won the reader poll, causing some to say Assange was robbed.
What just happened? In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.
It cannot be argued that Facebook has major implications in our lives today. Whether you actually use the site or not, it still changes the dynamic of how we do things and brings to light privacy, technology, and social issues that we would otherwise not think about.
The photo chosen for the cover is pretty creepy, especially when you consider the privacy issues Facebook has struggled with. As RWW points out, “TIME obviously wanted to imply something about Facebook’s privacy issues by choosing a photo where the young CEO seems to gaze right into your soul, as if he knew all your deepest, darkest secrets.”
Does Zuckerberg actually deserve Person of the Year? That’s still up in the air as far as many are concerned. What do you think?