Posted on 12/15/2010 5:16:36 AM PST by Enchante
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, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Does anyone remember what happened when TIME named Ayatollah Khomeini the 1979 Man of the Year? The magazine suffered HUGE financial losses from losing subscribers and advertisers that took years to recover from.
Here's a picture of worldwide facebook connections.
Sarah Palin and The Tea Party movement are small change by comparison.
Great point! At least we know any info about yourself on Facebook will never be sold or posted anywhere else!
I said “for influence upon US public affairs” so the FB “map” is not the relevant comparison.
Also, millions or billions of “connections” worldwide does not necessarily translate into world historical significance — so much of what happens on Facebook (and I do use it) is utterly insignificant.
However, if the standard for POTY is for a “world” newsmaker then I certainly don’t quarrel with the choice of Zuckerberg for 2010. It still remains to be seen whether the lasting “cultural” impact of FB is all that big or just another flash in the pan ala AOL and Yahoo etc. Certainly FB is putting up big numbers of users, and I do enjoy it some, but a case can be made that it’s not (yet) making any big cultural and political “newsworthy” type of impact.
It's true that FB may, in itself, be another flash in the pan..... but let's look at what AOL and Yahoo! did. I won't say they made the internet what it is, but they made it accessible to tens of millions and opened the way for the internet to spread as it has.
What FB has done, is to help open up a style of communication that I have to think will spread worldwide. It's really just part of a larger sea change in communications that my kids are in the thick of (and I only barely understand). I think the Wikileaks thing is actually part of that phenomenon.
It stands a good chance of changing (for good or ill) the way people look at the world.
The most interesting thing about that map, IMO, is the big black areas in Asia: no Middle Eastern countries, and no China. It'll be interesting to see what happens when those areas start to fill in.
Well, coaltrain ... we stalk Geert Wilders over on this page ... :-)
Geert Wilders IFA Friends
http://www.facebook.com/GW.IFA
If you want to comment there ... just click the “Like” button next to the name of the page, right at the top. But, you do have to be signed-in to do that.
Son? Is that you, mommy?
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