Socially removed: the Social Network

This year’s 83rd Academy Awards is filled with possibilities, with the Best Picture torn down the middle between David Fincher’s “The Social Network” and Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech.”

While “The King’s Speech” is regal, optimistic and fantastically acted, you would be hard-pressed to find a more sharply scripted, sleekly shot and socially relevant film than the “The Social Network.”

Douglas Beckwith, TV writer and dean at the University of Phoenix commented on the film, saying, “While I hate using the cliché, ‘The Social Network’ is definitely a defining zeitgeist movie for its insights into the youth-oriented, greedy, techno-capitalistic, lonely world many people live in.”

The film effectively reflects a generation of computer wiz brats. Jessie Eisenberg captures that egotistical and opportunist genius with verve and confidence, constantly two steps ahead of everyone else on screen, until, finally, he is rendered a lonely kid with social deficiencies. Ironic, since he created the ultimate social network.

This kind of ironic punch is what drew Fincher, Eisenberg and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin into the project. Fincher stated in TIME magazine, “who better to have invented this technology than somebody who needs it?”

The film doesn’t only mark its protagonist’s need to attain social superiority but also embodies the launching of a website that has sucked so many people into its cyber world.

Facebook has propelled Internet addiction — a giving over of our social selves to technological isolation. We are in an age where we live a majority of our lives online — we date, do banking, business, get our news and entertainment ­— cutting out talking to anyone on the phone or in person.

The Internet, while connecting us to the world, is also replacing our physical interactions. We are exceedingly removed from real social contact, replaced by quick fix social networking, status updates, poking, commenting and “liking.”  

It is not surprising that we can have hundreds of friends on Facebook and only really talk to a handful of them. It makes us feel better to have a list of people we claim as “friends.” It makes us feel like we’re part of something — a landscape where we mingle and share, sometimes way too much.

It is what makes Facebook so successful, by tapping into our subconscious desires to be connected to society, to be liked and for people to show interest in our lives in return.

But an identity online is only a representation of our real selves. The Internet can only do so much to replicate who we are as people in flesh and bone. It’s a space where we can have any identity we want people to see.

This is what makes “The Social Network” not only a movie depicting the Facebook phenomenon but also a movie of our current times, a mirror of how technology has changed our social interactions and how the Internet has both connected us and removed us from real life.    

People might think that the film is Facebook-centric. It is, after all, known as “the Facebook movie.” But for those who have yet to succumb to the film, I think it’ll come as a surprise to see that there isn’t even a modern Facebook page shown until the final scene, that the story is really about friendship and betrayal and that aforementioned social loneliness and isolation.  

Come Oscar night, if the Academy crowns “The King’s Speech” Best Picture of 2010, I guess I can’t be too disappointed in that it’s a great film, as well. But the Academy would be playing it safe, and I’ll just assume that they don’t fully recognize the current world we’re all living in, or the impact that social networking has had on our planet (just look at the recent revolution started in Cairo, empowered by Facebook). Or maybe it’s just that the academy doesn’t get the cold braininess that makes “The Social Network” not only a parable of society today, but also, simply, a masterfully made movie.


E-mail: mfiandt@indiana.edu