Sometimes the Internet offers odd combinations

And this morning I found an odd one indeed. Hitler, Zuckerberg and Stalin, who each made Time’s MAN OF THE YEAR:

Let me be crystal clear I did not set this combination up, I simply found it and found it curious. Maybe such combinations point to the trivial value of Time’s nomination of a Man of the Year. The connection between these three is a bit of trivial interest, but does indicate how some people do “free association” and then post such on the Web.

I did kind of like the Borovitz report that Time made a startling discovery in finding that Zuck was a man/person and not just some online abberration!

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I can’t deny Time’s right to name whoever they prefer

Image via Wikipedia

But after Zuckerberg, consider the other nonentities who were on their list for Person of the Year:

Among Time editors, the Tea Party was the runner-up, followed by Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai, and the Chilean miners. Zuckerberg is the second-youngest Person of the Year, after Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

I would find it hard to identify such trivial celebrities. Trivial and derivative!

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• Time honours Zuckerberg (thehimalayantimes.com)

Gosh! This is a good morning for odd images!

Via GMSV and Big Picture:

The real meaning here! Not all geeks are robotic Zucherberg’s & Co

If you are very famous you will be spoofed

Image via CrunchBase

From the Borowitz Report:

In Controversial Decision, Time Magazine Calls Mark Zuckerberg a Person

Thousands Protest Designation

In my mind this headline doesn’t sound too farfetched!

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Discovery this morning: I like Zadie Smith’s way of thinking and writing

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

In NY Review of Books she essays about the Facebook monster and its mentor Mark Zuckerberg. And it’s kind great writing and thinking about this everywhere phenomenon, to wit:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

I wish I could write like that!

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• Generation Why? (nybooks.com)
• Zadie Smith: The Literary Material Girl (edrants.com)
• Mark Zuckerberg believes in a future disrupted by “the social experience” [TNW Social Media] (thenextweb.com)

David Pogue, he of NY Times tech fame

Image via Wikipedia

Did a review of a book about Facebook. Here’s a quote:

But according to David Kirkpatrick, who for many years was a technology editor at Fortune, Facebook is more than big. It’s a “platform for people to get more out of their lives,” a “technological powerhouse with unprecedented influence across modern life” and an “entirely new form of communication.”

This has abosolutely nothing to do with the Facebook I know and use. Who is David K? Where the hell does he live on the Web? Sounds like investor fantasy to me!!!! I still exchange emails with most intelligent people that I know. But I guess that’s me and I’m not what Facebook is about!!!

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