Fifteen-minute fame is not like the regular kind. It can't be scripted or organized or harnessed. The celebrities it creates are sticks in a stream, suddenly aswirl in a dizzying current. When JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater was hit on the head by a passenger's bag in August and had what he describes as the "hissy fit heard around the world," ending in a dramatic exit via an emergency chute, he was not expecting to become a folk hero to overworked, stressed-out employees everywhere. While he enjoyed some aspects of the limelight, he says, "I've never felt more alone in my life than I did at the height of public scrutiny."
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 live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year