December 16, 2010
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轉載 – Only Connect
每年到了這個時節，新聞總會報導本年的風雲人物 (Person of the Year) 是哪一位。 大多數時刻，在心中只會說一句：大美國主義……關我鬼事！ (記憶中比較佩服的一位，應該是1999年的 Person of the Year。 由於是千禧年，這年叫 Person of the Century，得主是愛因斯坦)
網上投票盛行，連風雲人物也搞了個網上票選。 看了上週關於Person of the Year的新聞報導；還以為維基解密的阿桑奇必定大熱勝出。 嘿，原來是大熱倒灶，本年度勝出的是Facebook的創辦人Mark Zuckerberg。
讀了這一篇編輯短評，串聯起近日身邊發生的事，忽然很有領悟。 為著相同的公平和義憤，同樣為著不同程度和不同定義的私隱，在同一個Facebook的平台上，自己近日的遭遇就如阿桑奇一般。 很喜歡文中所言，Assange 和 Zuckerberg就好像銅幣的兩面，代表著相同的價值觀 — 開放和透明(的力量)。 但在阿桑奇向任何勢力發動著「解密」的攻擊時，Zuckerberg卻以相同的理念建立了一個開放的平台，讓所有人自願在這個國度裡解下武裝分享資訊。 故此，被阿桑奇破壞了世界充满敵人，但Zuckerberg所建設的世界卻充滿朋友。
我想，這兩個本年度的icon，除了相同的價值觀外，也有著最根本的不同。 阿桑奇的所作所為，其原型可用零和遊戲代表。 而Zuckerberg的成就，卻建立在雙贏局面上。 連小學生也知道，Win-win position比Zero-sum game 優勝，問題是如何得到雙贏。 要逹成這個理想殊不容易。 原來除了價值觀外，策略和方針有時更見重要。 從本年度兩位風雲人物的事跡便可略知一二。
阿桑奇的經歷是一個警惕。 在博奕學上，玩零和遊戲的人，多少也代表著一種同歸於盡的悲觀情緒。 撫心自問，自己會否也像他一樣過份悲觀了？
(以下轉載自 Time.com, Editor’s Letter on Person of the Year 2010 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037181,00.html)
Only Connect
“On or about December 1910, human character changed.”
— Virginia Woolf, 1924She was exaggerating — but only a little. Woolf saw a fundamental shift in human relations taking place at the beginning of the 20th century “between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.” Those changes, she predicted, would bring about transformations in every sphere of life, from religion to politics to human behavior. Few would say she got it wrong.
A century later, we are living through another transition. The way we connect with one another and with the institutions in our lives is evolving. There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another. Our sense of identity is more variable, while our sense of privacy is expanding. What was once considered intimate is now shared among millions with a keystroke.
More than anyone else on the world stage, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is at the center of these changes. Born in 1984, the same year the Macintosh computer was launched, he is both a product of his generation and an architect of it. The social-networking platform he invented is closing in on 600 million users. In a single day, about a billion new pieces of content are posted on Facebook. It is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third largest country on earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head of state.
Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle — about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar’s number — 150 — also happens to mirror the average number of friends people have on Facebook. Because of airplanes and telephones and now social media, human beings touch the lives of vastly more people than did our ancestors, who might have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Now the possibility of connection is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson says, “We’re in uncharted territory.”
All social media involve a mixture of narcissism and voyeurism. Most of us display a combination of the two, which is why social media are flourishing faster and penetrating deeper than any other social development in memory. Social media play into the parts of human character that don’t change, even while changing the nature of what once seemed immutable.
Like two of our runners-up this year, Julian Assange and the Tea Party, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a whole lot of veneration for traditional authority. In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange 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. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange’s case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg’s case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.
At 26, Zuckerberg is a year older than our first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh — another young man who used technology to bridge continents. He is the same age as Queen Elizabeth when she was Person of the Year, for 1952. But unlike the Queen, he did not inherit an empire; he created one. (The Queen, by the way, launched a Facebook page this year.) Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is a recognition of the power of individuals to shape our world. For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them (something that has never been done before); for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.
– Richard Stengel
