’The third era of Zuck’ : how the CEO went from hero to humiliation | Mark Zuckerberg

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  • ’The third era of Zuck’: how the CEO went from hero to humiliation | Mark Zuckerberg | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/06/mark-zuckerberg-public-image-cambridge-analytica-facebook
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f9ea33edca9b75c81444946e6afc11dad541e228/0_0_3094_1857/master/3094.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

    The exercise is practically an American tradition – executives from airlines, banks, credit agencies and tobacco companies have all been there. But for Zuckerberg, a CEO whose personal image is inextricable from that of the company he founded, it is symbolic of his loss of control of the narrative.

    “We now are entering what I would call the third era of Zuck,” said Tim Hwang, who founded the California Review of Images and Mark Zuckerberg, a journal of academic essays on the “visual culture of Mark Zuckerberg”. Hwang sees Zuckerberg as a sort of techie Madonna, cycling through personas as he matures, both shaping and reflecting the culture.

    First there was Zuck the “plucky in the college dorm room hacker guy”, said Hwang, who is also director of the Harvard-MIT ethics and governance of AI initiative. Then came “Zuck as world leader” – a period that saw the CEO travelling the world, meeting with elected leaders, occasionally donning a suit and speaking authoritatively about his global ambitions and social values. Zuckerberg and his public relations team successfully exploited Facebook’s signature blurring of the lines between the personal, political and commercial to create “Mark Zuckerberg”: the responsible boss, good husband, loving father, daring philanthropist and credible world leader.

    Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, with their daughters in Palo Alto, California. Photograph: Charles Ommanney/AP
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    Hwang calls this new era Zuckerberg’s “in the wilderness phase”. “This is one of those moments where we’re really fascinated because this huge PR machine has sort of cracked and we can see through, and what we can see is someone way over his head,” he said.

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