What
gets put on the internet never gets lost. Nothing truly disappears.
And all it takes is a few clicks and your life is revealed for everyone to
see. The internet completely revolutionized the conception of community,
culture, and social network. No longer are people we connect to and
communicate with solely the people we can physically run into, send notes of
paper and ink, or have one –sided relationships with across the airwaves.
Now communication becomes a two-way path that stretches across the globe.
As Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyer incredulously remarks in The Social Network
“Bosnia, they don’t have roads, but they have Facebook”.
The Social Network delves into the website that revolutionized how
people interact with one another. And by doing so with a fictionalized
account of a true story, the movie reveals the true power of putting a
personality on a screen. In some ways, the computer allows us to become
more than our real selves, to choose how we want to be perceived and do what we
want to do. And in other ways we lose control of our own image, as the
real Mark Zuckerberg lost his to Jesse Eisenberg’s affectless version.
The Social Network cuts from image to image in a rapidly building
montage as Zuckerberg smirks and sums up life in this new world: it isn’t a
matter of who sees it, but “who are they going to send it to”. The
Internet. It moves fast. It hurts. It heals. It allows a socially awkward kid
desperate to both rebel and fit in to create something that will make him
known. Make him remembered. For someone who does not always understand
how to interact with people, Mark has a keen sense of what the people want:
knowledge, fast and personal and all in the comfort of wherever they are.
And yet can the complexities of human persona and relationships truly be
captured by a ranking algorithm written on a dorm window or a relationship
status and a few words on a Wall post? Can everything be created on the
web or does there have to be some real world connection to anchor a
person?
No
matter what image you post as your profile pic or what you type for your “about
me”, real interactions can still permeate into the viral universe. What
happens in the real world gets put on the internet and what gets put on the
internet has consequences in the real world. Zuckerberg’s attempt to
friend his ex-girlfriend and his repeated refreshing of her homepage radiates
the coldness of their real life relationship; Facebook becomes both a means to
connect with those lost and a portrayal of how impersonal and distant the world
has become. It is too simple to only say that Facebook has
severed all human interaction or that it has miraculously connected all people.
The Social Network looks behind the glowing screen; it sees both
the positive and the negative of new media and in a kind of meta way, reflects
it. Like the internet, it’s not clear who is good and who is bad: each
character is flawed, sympathetic, right, and wrong. It doesn’t matter
that they are on a screen or are portraying a fictional account; it doesn’t
mean it’s not real it’s just not the full story.
