The power of Hollywood
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been awarded Time magazine's iconic Person of the Year title. At 26 years old, Zuckerberg is the youngest winner since the 25 year old aviator, Charles Lindbergh, won the first such award back in 1927 and a fortnight younger than our own Queen Elizabeth was when she won the prize in 1952.
The award recognises the person that the judges felt had most influence on the events of the year, and the choice of Zuckerberg might surprise some readers. Time said the Facebook founder deserved its award "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".
Facebook did not burst upon the scene this year, and neither has it become especially more significant in the world of social networking. Indeed, if the title was to be awarded for social impact, a much better candidate this year would be Jack Dorsey, the relatively unknown inventor of Twitter which has become a household word in the last twelve months.
Facebook is never far from controversy and its biggest news story over the past twelve months has been the uproar over privacy issues. A year ago it introduced a new set of privacy tools which surprisingly took away privacy. Previously private profiles suddenly became public by default, and the site's privacy policy grew to over 5,000 words. But at the same time, Zuckerberg has been thrust into popular culture, with an appearance on prime time Oprah at which he announced his intention to donate millions to US schools, and most notably as a result of the recently released movie, "The Social Network", which tells the story of the founding of Facebook.
The runners up in this year's awards were The Tea Party and Julian Assange who both arguably had more impact on the news than Facebook has had. Other nominees on the short list included Lady Gaga.
So Zuckerberg joins a list of illustrious winners which includes Obama, Reagan, Churchill and Gorbachev, but also some not so illustrious winners such as the 1938 person of the year, Adolph Hitler, followed by Joseph Stalin in 1939, and who could forget 1982's winner, "The Computer".
21st December 2010
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.