Yesterday, with a second Depression afflicting the nation, two wars, Wikileaks, and the Tea Party rebellion, I discovered that TIME had decided to make Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, its new Person of the Year 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.” TIME’s Richard Stengel sees Facebook as not just a new social mechanism; it’s “the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet.”
Accepting the honor (on Facebook), Zuckerberg wrote:
“Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
The Wall Street Journal quickly put its seal of approval on TIME’s choice with an essay by a philosopher-ethicist, no less, on why Facebook is so important to us. Humans, it appears, were apparently built to “breathe, eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and check Facebook.”
Thus, to the visionaries at TIME and the WSJ, Facebook is not only a new social function but a new bodily function and has been elevated to a replacement for normal human relationships. NPR showed a bit more skepticism, though, wondering if perhaps better choices might have been available to TIME’s editors. NPR’s poll showed 75% of NPR listeners thought someone else should have been chosen. ComputerWorld saw the choice of Zuckerberg as a snub to Julian Assange, who was also the leader in the NPR poll. Many journalists wondered what was going on in Richard Stengel’s mind.
Like the Nobel Prize award to Obama last year, Zuckerberg’s award does not come as a surprise in our new Snookified world. We do live in a society in which basketball players earn a thousand times more than teachers and ex-cons like Martha Stewart and Buddy Cianci have their own TV and radio shows. And maybe it’s simply to avoid predictability that undeserved awards are given in the first place.
But undeserved? Is this really too harsh? How can one say that Zuckerberg, a white, privileged son of both a dentist and a psychiatrist, who came to Harvard via Philips Exeter academy and whose social networking creation may well be the result of theft or plagiarism, does not deserve the award?
After all, who doesn’t love self-indulgent narcissism? This is the true product of our collective use of Facebook — billions of digital pork sausages oozing from the grinder. If talking to one’s friends on a cell phone while visiting a rest room isn’t enough, Facebook lets people disclose even more about their one-night stands, drunken binges, the games they play on company time, or the fragile state of their mental health. You can post thousands of photos of yourself on Facebook. If you’re deranged, you can even post your suicide note, as Clay Duke did. How can something like this not be vital to the functioning of a society? We can get our 15 minutes of fame every day on Facebook.
Stengel tries to apply lipstick to the pig by describing how Facebook and Wikileaks are “two sides of the same coin”:
“Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends.”
Apparently TIME’s editors, one would have supposed champions of the Fourth Estate’s responsibilities, don’t see transparency in government as something which empowers citizens in any way. For TIME, narcissism is true empowerment. Taking flak for his choice, Stengel said that “I do think something is going on deep down in the human character that’s changing and evolving. […] Is there a bigger story than that? I don’t think so.”
Stengel also justified passing over Julian Assange: “There is no Julian Assange without Bradley Manning,” he wrote, referring to the presumed source of many of the leaked classified documents.
He was right about that.
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