Friend Your Day Away: The Anti-Social Network

[marmar]

from In These Times:




Friend Your Day Away: The Anti-Social Network
The Social Network and Facebook are seriously overrated.

By Michael Atkinson


David Fincher’s film The Social Network is on its way to taking virtually every Best Film prize available to American movies, from the National Board of Review, to critics’ circles across the country to a Best Picture Oscar. Leaving aside the dubious honor an Academy Award becomes with just a little perspective (consider how much fun you’d have settling down tonight to revisit recent Oscar winners like Crash, Chicago, A Beautiful Mind), the spume of praise and accolades arising around the Fincher’s new film is remarkable. Hailed by Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers as “an American landmark!”, The Social Network is thought to be The Film with Its Finger on the Pulse, as it were, which is, in some ways, unarguably true, but in other ways as useless and empty as the acceptance of a “friending” by a total stranger.

The narrative of the film is, in outline, drab and inconsequential: college squabbles, modest programming achievements, money, betrayals, lawsuits. If the entity at the center of the cyclone weren’t Facebook, it would barely justify a TV drama’s single episode, regardless of how many thorny zingers Aaron Sorkin stuffed into his screenplay. But it is. And how familiar we all are with Facebook by now is the film’s raison d’être—its extra-cinematic fuel.

The boilerplate cant regarding Facebook in the media posits the site as having changed our lives. But has it? How is your life significantly different due to Mark Zuckerberg’s contraption? Is it more than a monstrous distraction? You should clock yourself on an average day, and see how many minutes you waste futzing with Zuckerberg’s masterpiece. If you aggregated the time expended in the last three years between FarmVille (reportedly, 1% of the world’s population plays it) and the strained efforts by millions to post witty status updates every day, you would have enough man-hours to build a small nation’s economy.

Facebook’s stupendous popularity seems to suggest a pervasive and alarming need for even the tritest “connection” in a world many times less socialized, connected and communal than the one in which our parents and grandparents grew up. But ubiquity itself is not much of a significator, particularly when the product at hand is completely free. Imagine the exodus of attention Facebook would suffer if Zuckerberg decided to charge $1 for its use. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6847/friend_your_day_away_the_anti-social_network