Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice.
Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.
"I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice."
I have to wonder - Assange has only received serious press attention for the last few weeks. Isn't this just a case of him being more fresh in our minds?
Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has made a bigger impact on the world?
> Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has made a bigger impact on the world?
This is about this year IMO. Also think about masses, people from afghanistan and pakistan who don't know/care about FB knows about Assagne thanks to he being given high coverage in world media.
I'm really not sure what people in Afghanistan know or how much "World Media" they consume, but I'm pretty sure more of them would have heard of Facebook than Julian Assange.
edit: Changed name because apparently I get modded down for referring to Mr Assange as "Rapey McRapeHair"
Caption: "Supporters of Islamic political party Jamaat-e-Islami protest in Peshawar against an online competition to draw pictures of Prophet Mohammad on Facebook which Muslims deem blasphemous May 20, 2010"
There are very few computers, fewer with internet connections while Television and newspaper are everywhere. Since a month Assagne have been in news, almost daily but FB rarely gets any press. What you see are occasional coverage. Facebook is a part of life of a particular class of society, but there exist another part whose main issue is to fight poverty and related stuff. They may not even have heard of the name of Facebook but they read newspapers. Even for US, how many times was Mark mentioned vs Assagne in print media say NYT ? In the end, Facebook can affect only those, who uses them or at max have internet connections. Wikileaks affect almost everyone.
Honestly wikileaks barely actually affects anyone. Facebook has changed the day to day lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. I can't imagine my life being different at all in the absence of wikileaks, and unless wikileaks in the future leaks something more interesting then I doubt it ever will.
The actual nature of wikileaks's leaks has turned out to be so prosaic that it hasn't really changed anything. Apparently diplomats bitch about things. Whoop de fricking doo.
edit: Wait, I forgot about the Kenya thing, of which Assange claims "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak."
Depends, Wikileaks at least seems to credibly have a stack of incriminating stuff on the big banks. Who know's what else people will pass along to them now it's been shown how effectively they can capture the worlds attention.
If I had some important secret documents to leak which provided evidence of wrongdoing on the part of government officials, I'd leak it to the New York Times or other major newspaper. They're the best place to go for stuff like that -- they have a huge readership, a staff who will dig into the surrounding issues, and a heck of a strong reputation (as opposed to ugly-website-run-by-creepy-alleged-rapist).
I'd only leak to wikileaks if I (for some reason) wanted to leak ten gigabytes of randomly selected secret documents of no particular consequence. Wikileaks is the open mic night of leaking -- it's where you find the random crap, not the big stories.
No, they frequently run leaks which they think are in the public interest. And they have pretty low standards for what they think is in the public interest -- ultimately they just need to be able to come up with a good justification for believing it might be in the public interest, since their primary purpose is to sell newspapers.
They would refuse to leak random diplomatic cables which don't show any wrongdoing by anybody, though. (Although they're quite happy to publish a story about them if someone else is responsible for the leaking.)
Wikileaks' reputation is impeccable: it does what it says on the package, and has been the source for nearly uncountable major newspaper articles over the past few years because of the complete accuracy of its information. The NYT had Judith Miller.
Actually it doesn't do what it says on the package, because it's not actually a wiki any more, is it?
If I were the wikimedia foundation I'd be complaining about that.
edit: And on the point of accuracy... it would be an interesting prank to leak some fake documents to Wikileaks and see if you can get 'em to make a big fanfare about them. Preferably you'd fake enough documents so that they wouldn't really check them, and it would be several days into the media cycle before folks started to notice that some of the most incriminating memos were sent between parties such as "I. P. Freely" and "Amanda Hugnkiss".
it would be an interesting prank to leak some fake documents to Wikileaks and see if you can get 'em to make a big fanfare about them.
It's interesting that you think that they aren't already constantly being bombarded with false information via intelligence agencies as a tactic to discredit them.
is an annoying rhetorical tactic. Instead of explicitly suggesting P, which might require you to support the proposition P, you instead sneer at the possibility that someone might think not-P.
Actually in this case my main reason for believing not P is that they haven't been successfully trolled yet. If an intelligence agency did attempt this trick then they'd almost certainly succeed, because the Wikileaks crew are mere mortals and quite capable of being fooled by a clever fake.
If any intelligence agencies are reading this, though, and feel like offering me a job in the wikileaks-trolling department I'd be happy to accept it.
Sure, but the game where Alice inserts random fake information into a stream and Bob tries to pick out that fake information is much harder for Alice than for Bob.
Mostly because Bob needs a 100% success rate while Alice wins with any success rate below 100%.
Oh, one more thing: Assange likes to whine every time he thinks someone is after him. If they'd picked up a bunch of fake CIA-planted information being submitted then they'd be talking about it, wouldn't they?
You wouldn't leak to The New York Times because they have no secure mechanism of any kind for leaking.
WikiLeaks is not just a two-bit news outlet looking for stories. They continue to maintain one of the most innovative and secure systems in the world for leaking sensitive materials.
Assange has repeatedly let his SSL certificates and PGP keys expire, had has had a series of completely insecure submission systems that have been disabled most of the time since he started whoring for donations a couple years ago.
If all goes accordingly, definitely Wikileaks. Imagine a world a fea years from now where every single country, and perhaps even cities have their own wikileaks site to keep politicians honest without doing bad things behind people's backs.
I'd definitely say that will have a much bigger impact. Besides what has Zuckerbeg doen this year that he hasn't done a year before?
Exactly. Assange's influence has only become widely discussed within the last month. It seems he is more likely to be on track to be POTY in 2011 than to have been skipped over entirely.
Can you specify in more details what you think is the scale of Julian's impact? From media coverage it looks like the impact has been huge, but is it really? I am not against Julian, I would not object if they selected him instead of Mark, I am just not sure that until now the real impact (of Wikileaks) on how the world operates was that big.
I believe he's a harbinger of things to come. Not necessarily in the sense of new leaks coming from WikiLeaks, which has been fairly tame so far.
I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them.
Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge.
Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam.
I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate.
The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.
The balance of power between governments and citizens has been changed forever. In 100 years everyone will remember Julian Assange; no one will remember Mark Zuckerberg. And that's true even if WikiLeaks were now to vanish; there will be dozens of replacements (like OpenLeaks).
I seriously doubt many will remember him three years from now. The most noise about him is related to his Sweden affairs not something truly remarkable he has done.
And after listening to him on BBC I started to dislike him rather a lot.
I may be terribly wrong, but my gut feeling is that his main agenda is personal fame, or something else, not common good.
What has he actually impacted? Whose lives are affected, really, by what he did? Facebook, for good or ill, actually affects many people lives, and he was in the news in addition.
Instead of Assange they could have done the 'anonymous' leakers since it's their information that is really on display.
Also, given the criteria where is Osama Bin Laden? His actions have done more to change the everyday world for people in the US than any other person in the last decade.
If they were recognizing a person in a particular year, but took into account there past accomplishments also I think he is a decent choice. Just this year though nothing person of the year ground breaking has happened, with the movie coming out it's almost delayed recognition, when it was all happening not many actually knew it.
Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.