I may need to start the sentence with the words of disgust to bring out the volcanic attention raiser or getting inebriated before blogging trash about my true feeling for social media so I can try to be an asshole like most of the characters encircling the social media whiz kid, Mark Z. telling him what he is about or trying to be, because criticism is not a crime, it is a seemed to be justified punishment for the youngest billionaire, punk, and genius of the Facebook founder or any given uber successful personalities as a way to make us feel better about our selves and our addiction towards Facebook without losing our sense of pride and sense of reality in that matter. So enigmatic and eerie is the magnitude of his potential power and ambition to get everyone on the face of the earth connected, you can simply feel the urgency to disconnect from the system and find your grounded rationalization on why you cannot explain the automatic, autistic drive of time-consuming quick finger flicking of refreshing your Facebook page every few minutes expecting for new updates or for the world to change. How you waste Clay Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” of your time and energy to doodling around the page is no different than relent to the temptation to have a sip of that alcohol in your longing bittersweet tongue.
Thus, you enjoy the cathartic ride of watching his life turned into a piece of art in form of motion picture telling the oldest story of human ambition, loneliness, loyalties and yes, Hollywood tradition of high school serenade on the myth of social status and the struggle to be cool. In line with Manohla Dargis’s NYT review, stripped off of its information age setting and tech talk ping pongs, interchanged it with typical teen genre or even a Roman sets; David Fincher can still deliver to you the essence and the thrill of humanistic drama of a nerdy kid trying to be on top of the exclusive social heap of his class and celebrating the ego of being right and getting even with those frenemies reproaching him. On top of that, cold and calculative performance of quiet intensified tide turning to howling storm from the inside by Jesse Eisenberg whose real life choice of keeping his private life out of the celebrity spot light is by not having social network account and being closest to that concept only by playing that dude that invents it; bringing more contrasts to the surface on how he portrays the lurking loneliness and strives for recognition and control of how you want people perceive you as the intangible grand motive.
In a way, that is social network in a nutshell. You try to shape up your real life with the second life in the net (excuse the pun) makes it glossier, grittier, more dramatic as you wish to create it and let people peek into it. It is the communication of monologues of long lost acquaintances and old friends and family members. The social network just brings the conversation up a notch to a messier and more complicated world by building this illusion of us having our own power in controlling the distribution and access towards ours and other people’s privacies and information. A cultural shift of our time that Simon Chesterman points out how we voluntarily and more open in giving up our personal information through the social networks sites that paving the golden ways for government and corporate to tap and reproduce it easily. Aside from the conspiracy theory of the world losing control in a whole different level (but yeah, what’s new, people just love the tinged sense of self-eroded through overconsumption anyway), the movie also instigate the old tale of the man behind the machine caught up in his own device. The ironic paradox of the disturbing last scene where Mark is sitting alone in the battle room after getting rid of his nemesis, clicking monotonously the refresh button of his master craft web page to see if his ex already accepts his invitation as friends parallels back to how life in the net cannot be less cruel and lonesome than the so-called real life. It just makes it more complicated and adds up new social lexicon of the already anxious dating and friendship life to think about.
Chesterman, Simon (Nov 12, 2010). “A Little Less Privacy, a Bit More Security”. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/opinion/13iht-edchesterman.html. Retrieved Jan 16, 2011.
David, Anna. “The Social Network's' Reluctant Star”. The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-26/the-social-networks-jesse-eisenberg-interviewed/. Retrieved Jan 16, 2011.
Dargis, Manohla (Sep 23, 2010) “The Social Network: Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular”. The New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/movies/24nyffsocial.html?pagewanted=3. Retrieved Jan 16, 2011.
Shirky, Clay (June, 2010). “How cognitive surplus will change the world”. TED. http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html. Retrieved Jan 16, 2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment