The following about The Social Network  movie,  and the ensuing revelations of Sorkin’s “anti-Internet bias”,  was something I came to over a span of a week or so after people started reacting to the movie, via Tweet posted links to reviews and some coverage of Sorkin’s comments about the Internet,  as well as some podcasts like “This Week in Google” on Leo Laporte’s TWIT network,  and The Gillmor Gang,  where the movie was reviewed and discussed and examined re: the Zuckerberg character and the apparent curmudgeon-ishness of Sorkin re: the Internet.

Producer Scott Rudin said last night:  “"It may be about people typing and talking. but it was done with bravado and genuine emotional authenticity."   Perhaps authenticity of actor to script,  but I also can’t ignore how totally different the Sorkin Zuckerberg is from the one I have watched on various interviews.  The real Zuckerberg smiles and laughs a lot.  The one in The Social Network could scarcely manage an amused smirk,  except in a scene after he and Saverin were getting it on in a bathroom stall  with a couple of groupies that he and Saverin met.  He also managed to smile when the Sean Parker character told him he needed to think in “billions”.  Another recurring theme was Z’s relationship that ended at the beginning of the movie,  followed immediately by the invention of Facebook,  and renewed energy was expressed (ie “We need to expand”) immediately after pushed away again in a chance restaurant encounter  with the now x girlfriend.  In actuality,  Z  has had the same girlfriend all the way through from before Harvard to now,  where  she is STILL his girlfriend.

Now I grant that writers and producers are entitled, I guess, to fictionalize.  But some may ask (and have),  then why call the company Facebook and use  the real names of the characters?  Seems  obvious to me that there is a juiciness to a “depiction” vs a “metaphor” as they called  it last night at the awards.  And I have run  across several people who took the movie as an accurate depiction of Zuckerberg and Facebook. 

There was a distinct undertone of condescension toward geek culture as perceived by Sorkin.  The “aha” moment where Zuckerberg showed his most heightened excitement in the movie,  was when a friend asked him about how one could tell what girls were available caused Zuckerberg to jump up and run across campus to his room and add the “Relationship Status” indicator. The theme seemed to be,  a system to help us get laid,  which befits Sorkin’s view of the Internet and its tool-makers as adolescent and inane.

I don’t really have a protest against it being best Picture.  If Sorkin,Rudin,  and  Fincher want to call it a “metaphor” rather than history,  I guess they can do that.  It was a witty and interesting script and story.  Having loved Sorkin’s TV series, The West Wing,  the same rapid-fire dialog seemed in top shape in The Social Network. I’d like to see a story done that truly captures Zuckerberg’s VISION for Facebook that is the real force behind its success as a platform to enabling online connections.  I’d also like to see the church and its Communications people seek to better understand the Social Graph,  the “engine” of Facebook’s elaborate system of connecting us to one another via interests and status updates and recommendations and likes.

(this post was originally a footnote to my previous post http://wp.theoblogical.org/wp222/?p=6673 , where I describe an encounter with a group of people where I ,  as I describe in the post, inject this argument  into a thread that had no interest in this argument.  It came across as an overwrought rant –and it WAS overwrought for the context).