Oh, the irony. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and subject of the fictionalized bio-pic “The Social Network” is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (POTY in Tweetspeak). Yet the Twitto-/blogo-spheres are full of comments, reactions, and largely surprises at Time’s choice. Perhaps the medium is indeed the message, for much of the criticism of the choice is being disseminated via Twitter, and a number of those critics believe Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone should have been the winners. The critique tends toward the notion that Time is about two-years-too-late to note the presence of Zuckerberg’s behemoth. Is ‘better-late-than-never’ a reasonable criterion for awarding the title?
Any such award runs the danger of looking naive soon after it is announced (anybody remember who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 while running two wars and ordering the increased use of drone missile strikes?). But it seems fair to say that Time’s choices over the last thirty-odd years fell toward the prescient rather than the retrospective: Lech Walesia in 1981 (a full decade before the Solidarity movement in Poland helped undermine the Soviet bloc) or ‘The Whistle-Blowers’ Cynthia Cooper (WorldCom), Colleen Rowley (FBI), and Sherron Watkins (Enron) in 2002 as the dust was still settling on the crises of each organization’s fiascoes at the turn of the millennium. One might even see in their actions the early steps of what Wikileaks is claiming to do today.
Not that Time needs to be defended in its editorial choices, but one of the points of agreement raised by a few of the comments that this blogger has seen seems quite appropriate. Namely, that though Facebook has been open to the public for a while now, its pop/cultural/news/media influences have really taken off only in the last year or two as older generations and established organizations of all kinds have found meaningful ways to steer the technology to their benefit, not merely posting a page.
And Zukerberg’s Facebook has responded with innovations pertaining to Messages and Places and security. Agreement with Facebook’s policies or business plan probably should not be part of the list of expectations for Time’s tip-of-the-hat, anyway. And certainly the success of the movie ‘The Social Network’ has brought the country’s attention to Mark, the myth, and the site’s influence on our social mores.
A few who did not get the cover might end up having even greater influence on America, though. The Tea Party was/were the runner-up, and Lord knows what will happen once some of its members become actual Congresspeople. Julian Assange claims to have at least one ‘poison pill’ awaiting the super-powers-that-be. Even the much maligned Hamid Karzai could keep US forces, diplomats, and attentions pinned down in the middle east for the foreseeable future. Only time will tell.