How "The Social Network" portrays social networking.

"The Social Network" depicts the way in which people not only interact through the cyber, but socially. It showed facebook to be the newest and most ideal way of socializing in this fast-paced technologically advancing era. The film itself did an accurate portrayal of the extent to which college students (and later on, people) connect their lives to the cyber, look for more opportunities, in regards to relationships of different kinds, friendships, various forms of entertainment, job and economic opportunities. It serves as a medium to live our own lives through, or to just accomplish the simple tasks one goes about doing outside of the internet, without any true interaction.

Mark Zuckerberg's character says in the film:

“People want to go online and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? Friends, pictures, profiles, whatever you can visit, browse around, maybe it's someone you just met at a party...I'm not talking about a dating site, I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.” (The Social Network)

The social network made it clear that users of facebook exhibit themselves however they want to, even if what they’re selling [themselves] isn’t the same in “real-life”. Today that experience which he spoke of in the film, and possibly in reality years ago, has become the entire social experience of life, not just college.

Though exclusivity is what Facebook originally offered, it isn’t as desired as it was once was, and now the entire cyber-world is realizing that by digitalizing yourself a whole new world of people, and networks are available to you, and you to them: it allowed it’s users to create their own social reality. Facebook, as the ultimate social network, was created in order to connect the disconnected to a perpetual cyber-social life that has the possibility to extend into the real thing.

The differing perspectives within the film: the Winklevoss’, Eduardo Saverin’s, Napster creator Sean Parker’s, and Mark Zuckerberg’s, allowed the film to have a balanced viewpoint of the story behind the creation of Facebook, and what social networking entails. The Social Network showed the accessibility that comes a long with social networking, and both the positive and negative exposure that can come with it. Overall, the narrative behind the creation of Facebook, the social network that surpassed all others, can be described as “...international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.” Social networking, as shown in The Social Network (in Facebook), is always changing and upgrading in order to make communication for the masses easier to access, more entertaining, and it’s own ways a cyber-replica of our lives.

Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses: an Essay on Mass Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.

The Social Network. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Rooney Mara. Columbia Pictures, 2010. DVD.