Mark Zuckerberg: Time Person Of The Year

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Like him, love him, or hate him, but TIME Magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg the Person of the Year for changing the way we all live our daily lives.

The creator of Facebook has been much criticized in recent months, especially since the release of the Columbia Pictures movie, The Social Network, which did not cast Zuckerberg in the greatest light. The screenplay, written by Aaron Sorkin, was adapted from a 2009 nonfiction book about the founding of Facebook, titled The Accidental Millionaires by Ben Mezrich.

No Facebook employee, including Zuckerberg consulted on the movieâ€which is perhaps why it was able to cut so close to the skin regarding its portrayal of how the founding of a social network that eventually led to change how half a billion people communicate, share and relate to each other on a daily basis unfolded. However sharp Sorkin’s blade, the film was not as candid as many viewers originally believed. Sorkin admitted he changed some of the events and characters for effect.

Many in the technological community came out against Sorkin’s portrayal of Zuckerberg ...
... (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and the events depicted in the movie, claiming that The Social Network was an anti-social, anti-geek and misogynistic attack against the effect of new technologies.

It seems that after all the bad publicity and all his court cases (Zuckerberg was sued by his early business partners), in the end, Zuckerberg has the last laugh. No one can deny the cultural impact that his creation has had our lives. And not just here in the USAâ€70% of Facebook’s users are people in other countries.

Not so long ago, TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year was…well…all of us, because of the impact that YouTube had on the culture. Now, by naming Zuckerberg 2010’s Person of the Year, they are recognizing the incredible achievement he actually accomplished. As TIME Magazine writer Lev Grossman put it, Zuckerberg was able to “wire together a twelfth of humanity,” signaling our entrance into “The Facebook Age”.

In fact, Zuckerberg’s own generation is probably the last one to ever remember a time when social networking was not done online. For every generation after that, the idea of having and managing a public faceâ€once reserved for politicians and celebritiesâ€is as normal as having breakfast.

Despite ongoing privacy issues and the fact that we have not yet learned as a species to manage our online personas with as much finesse as we try to imbue our non-virtual lives with, the fact still remains that we now take for granted the fact that we are able to talk to the rest of the world from our keyboards. This fact has already changed the way governments and businesses operate: from the Facebook leaks about the antics of prominent politicians, to a whole nation’s resistance to a corrupt regime, as in the case of Iran.

Whether you are the President of the United States or JC Penney, Mark Zuckerberg has affected your actions.