Mark Zuckerberg isn't much like Che or Gandhi, but he has ushered in a digital revolution

In a world not short of bad news, I try to focus on the good. In doing so, I’ve become alert to a tendency that we all share: we expect the future to unfold as a magnified or extrapolated copy of the present. We expect that the next big thing will be a bigger version of the last big thing. What we don’t expect, yet what is most likely, is that the next big thing won’t look important to us at all—until it’s so important that we can’t ignore it.

The film The Social Network features an unusual hero: a nerdy code-writer possibly on the autistic spectrum who invents a communication tool which, within a half decade, is being used by almost 10 per cent of the earth’s population. Perhaps those of us who