The Social Network

I enjoyed David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network, on Saturday evening. This being the opening night and being Harvard, the cinema was packed to the rafters, mainly with excited students hoping to catch a glimpse of a street/ lecture theatre/ bar they knew or had been to. So it was a fun atmosphere.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the film is based on the real life events surrounding the founding of Facebook in 2003 and its creator, Mark Zuckerburg - now the world’s youngest billionaire. It also attempts to unravel the claims and counter-claims made during several costly litigation battles that followed, with Zuckerburg accused of stealing the idea behind Facebook from other students and cutting his best friend (and former business partner) out of the company.

The film avoids the usual clichés by managing to paint a more subtle picture of Zuckerburg’s character than I would have expected. Played by the brilliant Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerburg appears contradictory: simultaneously confident and insecure, a creative genius but socially inept. Partly because of this subtlety, American audiences appear divided on how to interpret him.

On the one hand, are those that see the film as a classic tale of individual ambition and drive – celebrating the cornerstones of American capitalism. To them Zuckerburg is a visionary who saw the potential power of the internet to transform social interaction and then seized the opportunity to exploit it before anyone else.

On the other, are those who see Zuckerburg, not as a hero, but as a hubristic and flawed individual who betrays his friends in order to achieve wealth and stardom. To this audience, the central irony of the film lies in the fact that the man who has transformed the experience of social communication for millions is singly incapable of forming the most basic bonds of friendship. As David Carr comments in the New York Times, “the movie could well serve as a referendum on business aggression and ambition that breaks along generational lines”.

Aside from the question of what the film says about American capitalism, it has also made me think about the extent to which Facebook has transformed our experience of social interaction. To its cheerleaders, Facebook represents the front line in a movement to democratise social interaction by strengthening networks of peers at the expense of the old established social order, which left information in the hands of elites and meant social organisation was confined to hierarchies. However, as Malcolm Gladwell has convincingly argued in this month’s New Yorker, online social networking does not and will never replace the kinds of deep interaction, commitment and yes hierarchies that were necessary to achieve change in, say, the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.

As you can see I’m no Barry Norman but I hope this will convince you to at least watch the film on DVD – I think you’ll enjoy it.