The Person who Created Facebook
So Mark Zuckerberg, the designer of Facebook, has been named Time Publication's Person of the Year. That is great and definitely not undeserved, however there is something in the media coverage that I just can't withstand talking about. A lot of individuals state and also create that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. I do not think that that holds true.
Don't fret, I'm not going to spin any kind of conspiracy theories concerning exactly how Facebook remained in truth conceived by aliens or Freemasons or whoever in a bid for globe supremacy. My debate is harmlessly linguistic. To state that Zuckerberg (or anybody, for that issue) created the Facebook social-networking site is like claiming that somebody created the Osram light-bulb or the Nokia telephone. No one developed those things. Edison created the light-bulb, Bell developed the telephone, and then other individuals went along and enhanced those inventions and created the top quality items called Osram as well as Nokia.
The Person Who Created Facebook
In a similar way, Zuckerberg, for all his genius, did not invent the common idea of a social-networking website. That invention had already been made; there were other such sites around prior to Facebook went along, the likes of Friendster, MySpace and also Bebo. What Zuckerberg did was boost and also expand the idea, as well as his efforts were what ultimately tipped the balance and brought the original invention to the location where it is now-- which is all over.
My point is this: you do not develop particular top quality items. That's not how people normally utilize the verb to design. As I'm sure you can see on your own from my examples regarding light-bulbs and telephones, it really feels odd to state that someone developed Osram or Nokia. To speak lexicologically, the verb to develop does not have certain top quality products in its selectional choice. It just has a selectional preference for common ideas, for prototypes. However what baffles me is this: if people do not usually state that someone designed Osram or Nokia, why does everybody keep saying that Zuckerberg created Facebook? Even Time itself, in the "Person of the Year" problem, has this collocation twice. It is regular enough alike parlance, too: just google it.
Perhaps the factor is that, due to the fact that social-networking websites are such a new phenomenon, individuals are failing to appreciate the distinction in between the common concept (the "invention", if you will) and the certain application (Facebook itself). For lots of people, Facebook was the very first time they ever engaged with online social networking, and so in their minds, the invention as well as the application are conflated, coextensive. One more possible description is that individuals assume so very of the improvement Zuckerberg made to the original suggestion that, in their opinion, it constitutes a separate creation in its very own right: when people claim "Zuckerberg invented Facebook" they actually indicate something along the lines of "Zuckerberg invented a new kind of social-networking websites, of which Facebook is the very first (therefore much only) execution". And yet one more prospect for an explanation is that individuals suggest it not actually but as an aggrandizing, celebratory exaggeration-- a bit like stating that a king built a castle or that a general won a war.
Either way, I assume it's an interesting psycholinguistic observation: an abnormality in individuals's use of one specific verb (to create) relative to one specific things (Facebook) discloses a much deeper complication in people's understanding of exactly what this "Facebook point" is, where it originated from and what its relevance is.