The Social Network

The Social Network was a great movie overall. On the surface, it almost seems like another stupid movie trying to make money off of the popularity of something else. This is what it seemed like to me when I first saw the trailer; I couldn’t believe that this idea was seriously being made into a movie. When seeing the trailer at other movies and as a commercial on TV, I had similar reactions. Over time, though, the concept of the movie grew on me. I thought this might have been marketing at its finest, but after hearing all of the good reviews, I decided to give the movie a chance.

After seeing the movie, it becomes clear that there are so many things to be gleaned from it. It epitomizes so many things about our generation and about humans in general. One of the most important quotes of the movie is the one where Marc says his goal is to “[take] the entire social experience of college and [put] it online.” College is a unique experience in terms of the possibility of meeting new people and the way we meet them; it’s an experience everyone wants to have. Facebook facilitates this process greatly by allowing users to find each other by name, a.k.a. “facebook” each other. It’s a lot easier to facebook someone you met or friend someone you already know when seeing them on another person’s wall than it is to get everyone’s phone number or other contact information separately.

Another fact the movie touches upon is that people like to see other people they know online; everything is more meaningful when it’s about people you know. This was the logic behind the FaceMash website Marc launched in the beginning of the movie. If someone sees a story posted online about a random person in an extraordinary situation, it’s interesting. If the subject of the story is someone that person actually knows, they drop whatever they’re doing to read it. Facebook makes this phenomenon much more frequent and much easier to attain. If someone posts a story or an interesting anecdote about themselves on their news feed, their friends almost feel as if they’re involved; they feel a connection to some extent. They feel as if they are getting a firsthand account of the story, as opposed to reading about or hearing a reporter tell the story.

This relates to another reason that was pointed out in the movie about why people love facebook: they like to learn about people they know and see what’s going on in their lives. We all do it once in a while – look at our news feeds, look through our friends’ new albums, sometimes comment on them or press the like button. It’s impossible to be everywhere at once, and it’s impossible for someone to hang out with all of his or her friends all the time. Even when with certain people, it’s impossible to witness every single thing that happened that day or night. Facebook helps people see what they miss; it helps them “re-live the party the next day” and makes them feel like they were there, even if they were not.

Basically, facebook fulfills a great number of social needs for many people, which is one of the reasons for its popularity. The Social Network really hit the nail on the head in describing and portraying this.