Beating out the Tea Party, Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai and the Chilean miners, Mark Zuckerberg is Time‘s Person of the Year.

It’s a little difficult to disagree with Time—after all, it’s a far better choice than 2006’s “You” or the year they picked a Planet of the Year (guess who won? Earth!)—but parts of the essay explaining their choice sound like the middle of a college term paper written with minimal information, a couple of Adderall, and a looming deadline.

More than anyone else on the world stage, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is at the center of these changes. Born in 1984, the same year the Macintosh computer was launched, he is both a product of his generation and an architect of it. The social-networking platform he invented is closing in on 600 million users. In a single day, about a billion new pieces of content are posted on Facebook. It is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third largest country on earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head of state.

Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle — about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar’s number — 150 — also happens to mirror the average number of friends people have on Facebook. Because of airplanes and telephones and now social media, human beings touch the lives of vastly more people than did our ancestors, who might have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Now the possibility of connection is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson says, “We’re in uncharted territory.”

This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2010.

The editor of the Tucson Weekly. I have no idea how I got here.

9 replies on “That Guy Jesse Eisenberg Played in that Movie is Time’s Person of the Year”

  1. Maybe you should mention the fact that Assange had 360,000 more votes than Zuck in the online poll? Maybe that would be responsible journalism? Instead of saying, “It’s a little difficult to disagree with Time” maybe you could point out that Google News has about twice as many results for Assange than Zuck in 2010, including all the mentions Zuck’s just gotten for being “The Person Of The Year.”

    Maybe it could be pointed out that Zuck hasn’t done anything newsworthy this year except object to the only thing that’s made him memorable at all, which is Eisenberg’s depiction of him in The Social Network.

  2. I don’t think much of popular polling for things like this — after all, I think we all know how easy it is to game these sort of things, a narwhale could have won if the collective internet had put their hivemind to it — so it doesn’t bother me personally that Time when on its own editorially.

    These things are sort of silly anyway, but the fact that there are 424,000 mentions of Facebook in 2010 on Google News says something about why Zuckerberg won. History will tell who has the greater long-term influence, but for right now, Assange leaked information that was mildly embarrassing for the United States government, but Zuckerberg (for better or worse) created an information forum that became part of how the world communicates. You might think Facebook and/or Zuckerberg suck, but I’d venture to say your daily life is affected more by Facebook than Wikileaks.

  3. “I’d venture to say your daily life is affected more by Facebook than Wikileaks.” That would be the media’s (your) fault for utterly ignoring the gravity of the information we’ve received from Wikileaks.
    The fact that Facebook has more mentions as an organization than Wikileaks shows exactly how poor a job the mainstream media is doing, and exactly why Wikileaks is so important in the modern age.
    Calling evidence of torture, summary execution, war crimes, illegal espionage and unethical conduct not limited to writing and passing legislation in other countries “mildly embarrassing” shows exactly why even a liberal news source like your weekly is living in (and publishing) a fantasy world. So yes, use Facebook until your brain melts away everything you ignored about these leaks.

    In any case this is like making Tom the person of the year in 2005. Anyone who knows anything about social networking trends expects Diaspora to replace Facebook just as quickly as Facebook replaced Myspace and Myspace replaced Friendster and Friendster replaced Compuserve and AOL.

  4. Patrick, we’re not really a national publication…we tend to focus on local/regional news (because that’s what we do well), so it’s hardly the Tucson Weekly’s fault that Wikileaks hasn’t received the attention you’d like it to. Secondly, maybe “mildly embarassing” is a little bit of an understatement, but what did the recent batch of Wikileaks tell us that any informed citizen didn’t know or already suspect?

    I agree that Assange was a very important figure this year and I’m not dismissive of the value of Wikileaks as a whole (since more information about the actions of our government is generally a positive), but Facebook (again..for better or worse) has changed communication in a way Myspace or Friendster or whatever never did. This is the year that Facebook “broke” when all my relatives and neighbors and whoever got an account. Diaspora may be great, but it won’t likely have the singular focused cultural impact that Facebook did. Feel free to take cheap shots or make assumptions about how I use Facebook, but it’s not like you’ve deleted your page, no?

  5. I’m pretty sure the informed citizen didn’t suspect or know about FRAGO 242 or 039, both of which are direct orders from high level military officials to ignore torture in Iraq, or about Hillary Clinton ordering State Dept officials to spy on UN officials in violation of multiple international laws, or about the Wolf Squadron, which are armed (by us) former Republican Guards who run a torture camp, or about 3 Reuters employees getting gunned down by a helicopter (a video that the Washington Post had and sat on for years), or about DynCorp (95% funded by tax dollars) hosting a pedoparty, or thousands of other things the media either didn’t know or didn’t want to report, and I have to admit that all of these things seem at least slightly more important to me than what your mother ate for lunch, or the funny cat video she wants you to see, but doesn’t feel like emailing. You’re right though, the fact that your mother and grandmother now use Facebook does mean that it “broke,” just not in the way you meant.
    I use my Facebook page to distribute the news American MSM feels is unimportant (like the downing street memo, the fact that backscatter machines do nothing, or Burma building nukes), and I’m glad you’re enough of a creeper to search for me – for someone who loves Facebook so much you don’t seem to understand the protocol.

    I’m confused, how is Time’s POTY local news? Oh, I understand – you’re acknowledging that this article isn’t one of the things you’ve done well.

  8. I would rather they wait and make assange the man of the year when he gets locked up behind bars.

    As for zuckerbeg – I really feel for the person who created friendster its gotta be tough.

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