The Social Network Critique

David Fincher’s The Social Network is a humorous, yet dark portrayal of the evolution of cyber communication. The film depicts the intricacies of the foundation of the social networking website, facebook.com, examining the social values that incited the site’s conception, as well as the resulting legal issues. At its core, the film analyzes a central aspect of the human condition: the formation of relationships. Mark Zuckerberg, the protagonist (though he’s often pitted as the antagonist), is inspired to create the site after the success of his brief launch of “facemash” – an online game where Harvard students compared images of their peers, identifying the “hotter” students. The success of the game highlighted a prevalent interest among the student body: the ability to see one’s friends online. And thus, Zuckerberg was inspired to create a website where students could connect with people they knew (initially just from college), which he organized through ‘social networks.’ While his groundbreaking innovation has successfully tapped into an innate human fascination (obtaining information about people we know), it has also created a new mode of communication, ultimately redefining the way society transmits information and how people socialize.

In her article, “Friend Me if You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance,” E.J. Westlake examines the inherent ‘performativity’ of Facebook. She theorizes that an individual’s Facebook profile mimics a ‘real life’ construction of identity or ‘performance of the self’ (3). The profile enables the user to define ‘the self’ in a variety of ways. From basic statistics like date of birth, to social activism, the profile can present one’s persona through a multitude of diverse lenses. While the initial purpose of Facebook was to allow ‘real life’ social interactions to take place in the cyber realm, it has arguably become more about the construction and manipulation of ‘the self’ before the eyes of the Facebook audience. Westlake defines Facebook as a ‘performative text’: the Facebook user ‘acts’ (through providing profile information, ‘poking,’ ‘liking,’ and joining groups) before the implicit continuous presence of an ‘unseen audience’ (27).

While the public nature of a Facebook profile implies the consistent presence of an external audience, it consequently constructs a latent internal audience. Westlake draws a comparison between Foucault’s panoptic gaze and the relationship between the Facebook user and the ‘unseen’ Facebook audience. One’s awareness that they are always under surveillance by other Facebook users ultimately controls the information they supply, the words they use, and the actions they take on the site, resulting in the production of a carefully constructed persona that inherently conforms to socially normative behavior. Quoting Goffman, Westlake states, “…performances of self involve idealization – which may prompt the user to self-police so that he or she lives up to these ideals… ‘When the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society…’” (35). Thus, the Facebook user interacts with two implicit audiences: other users and himself. This mediation between ‘natural persona’ and ‘social norms,’ though magnified through social networking sites like Facebook, has always been an integral part of ‘real life’ identity construction. We ‘police’ ourselves before others can ‘punish’ us through social humiliation, ridicule, or ostracism. The ability to constantly ‘edit’ one’s Facebook persona incites the premeditation of identity, which ultimately results in self-reflection/self-surveillance.

In addition to prompting self-surveillance, social networking sites like Facebook have constructed a new concept: the ‘cyber narrative.’ In contrast to a static text, like a novel or a painting, the ability to continually revise and contribute to a cyber persona characterizes the cyber narrative as ongoing, dynamic, and variable. Without a distinct beginning, middle, and end of the story, the plot can take a plethora of shapes, depending on both the narrator’s conveyance of his/her persona and the audience’s attention to or awareness of certain defining characteristics over others. For example, every user’s newsfeed produces a different selection of user performance, which can ultimately result in different interpretations of a single narrative. I may only see an individual’s ‘relationship status updates’ in my newsfeed, while someone else may only see the groups that the individual joins, resulting in the construction of two different dominant narratives for that individual. A user’s ability to jump from one page to the next and to spend as little or as much time as they want on each page ultimately “[invites] the reader to choose the path and order of text read, as driven by the reader’s own desire and cognitive processing style” (Westlake 25). Thus, cyber narratives are individually constructed by each user and audience member – there is no absolute, hegemonic narrative that all readers retain from the cyber. If everyone has access to authorship on the Internet and every reader constructs his/her own interpretation of others’ cyber narratives, is it possible for one ‘truthful’ cyber narrative to exist? Considering cyber narratives lack textual linearity, does true authorship even exist? In other words, does the user have complete control over his/her construction of the self?

Works Cited

The Social Network. Directed by David Fincher. Columbia Pictures: 2010. Film.

Westlake, E.J. “Friend Me if You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance.” Project Muse: The Drama Review: Vol. 52, No. 4 (2008): pp. 21-40. Article.