Mark Zuckerberg as Time Magazine's Person of the Year?

Time magazine these days doesn't tend to capture my attention much. Although I occasionally visit its website, the print magazine doesn't serve as appointment reading for me anymore; the variety of news sources that exist today, and the limits on my time, make that impossible. My disaffection with the magazine in the past several years has also been related to its misguided efforts to distinguish itself from other magazines. This has come in the form of a redesign and what has seemed like an increase in the number of pictures and graphics- at the expense of valuable text- a reader will see in the magazine.

Despite my fraught relationship with the magazine today (only as a reader of course), I have maintained an interest in its selections for Person of the Year. It defines Time and promotes the magazine the way that educational rankings make U.S. News relevant. In a dramatically changing media landscape, people do look to Time for an authoritative sense of the people who have the most influence on the events and changes in our world. The Person of the Year issue presents the best opportunity for Time to take attention away from more hip or fashionable magazines like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic. Time seemed to have forgotten that when choosing last year's Person or it wouldn't have chosen Mark Zuckerberg.


Now, I have nothing against Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not naive, so I realize that the process of developing a new way for people to communicate and present themselves, then trying to monetize it, is a hard business, which Mark Zuckerberg and his company are getting better with. I actually have deep respect for Mark Zuckerberg, which is more the result of my seeing The Social Network and (much) less the result of Aaron Sorkin's almost cloying efforts to separate his personal feelings about Zuckerberg from his caustic interpretation of him. I think the story of The Social Network can resonate with anyone who has ever thought of channeling their sense of insecurity and helplessness with the way the world works into something visionary, productive, and lucrative. And I don't even need to try to analyze Facebook- even if you don't use it often and don't understand people who can spend all day on it, you likely have a profile. Like "Google" or "Xerox", Facebook is a company that has created a verb that reflects it's role as an essential part of our culture. If you want to legitimize a friendship, you "friend" a person. If you want to promote something (or yourself), you establish a Facebook page. If you want to efficiently find someone you know but have lost contact with, your best bet is to find them on Facebook. Who doesn't feel the slightest twinge of sadness when they realize they've been defriended, even if they haven't spoken to that person in two years? Who isn't somewhat amazed by people who proudly announce that they've defriended 50 people and a little jealous they don't have the nerve to do the same? Facebook is an essential element of how we interact with each other, or choose not to.

For that reason, Mark Zuckerberg should be given due credit as the public face of such a visionary and presently essential social network; it's no surprise he majored in Psychology at Harvard. However, that credit should not come in the form of 2010 Time Person of the Year. If he ever deserved that honor, it would have been a few years ago, when people were first starting to realize that Facebook was not going the way of Friendster or Myspace. But I don't think he deserves the honor at all. The Person of the Year is supposed to be someone who has almost come out of nowhere to effect great change in the United States and/or the world at large. The pace of Mark Zuckerberg's achievements (and the publicity they have received) have been steadily increasing for years and will continue to increase; they are not likely to plateau before Facebook's IPO is completed. The distinction of Person of the Year is supposed to go to the person who has had the fastest and most dramatic influence on world events in the past year. And for 2010, that person was Julian Assange.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in the past year knows something about Wikileaks. And whatever your opinion on Wikileaks' release of confidential materials like the State Department cables, that opinion is driven by whether the massive publicity accompanying the release of the cables has been good for increased access to information that is unfairly classified or is incredibly damaging to the diplomatic efforts of the United States, and everyone has one. No one can't not care about what Wikileaks means because it is now part of the dramatically changing media landscape that Time is struggling to stay relevant in, heralding a new era of citizen journalism, digital civil disobedience, and disregard for the the right of governments to withhold information from their citizens. Maybe the old media types at Time were reluctant to recognize a "new media" entity like Wikileaks that thumbs its nose at the standard operating procedure more traditional journalists pride themselves on, but I won't speculate on that today. Whatever Time's reason for not acknowledging Assange and Wikileaks, whether it was fear of infuriating government sources or concern about condoning potentially destructive actions, their reason was wrong. Acknowledging does not mean condoning, and recognition of Assange's actions would not have constituted an endorsement of said actions, especially since he was featured in the same issue as Zuckerberg anyway.

When Josh Tyranjiel, former Time editor and current editor-in-chief of Bloomberg Businessweek, spoke to Charlie Rose a few weeks ago, he characterized Time's choice of Zuckerberg as a "defensible choice". "Defensible", which basically means "okay but not great", is not how you want the topic for your magazine's most popular issue to be characterized. I would prefer "groundbreaking", "astute", or "on point". Even "controversial" or "baffling" would have been better, adjectives which accompanied the choice of "You" as Time's choice in 2006 because it provoked some thought about the role of the individual in the growth, profitability, and utility of the World Wide Web. I'm sure when people looked at the reflective cover representing "You" in December of 2006, they were either excited that Time had rightly acknowledged the consumer of digital goods like YouTube or Facebook which had meant nothing only 3 years before or pissed that Time had not chosen a prominent newsmaker. The point is, unlike this year's choice, which was received with a collective "okay" and shrug of the shoulders, people had a real reaction. And if Time is to maintain or reclaim (depending on your perspective) it's place as the preeminent news magazine in the United States, then it needs to do better than this...and use less graphics.