The Facebook Movie We Should Have Got Instead of The Social Network

One of the more interesting bits of Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network was her recollection of her own early experience of the Facebook social media site, which was as an increasingly "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" as upon graduation she was subjected to the ceaseless boasting of acquaintances about how wonderfully they were doing. She also mentions that when she first heard that there would be a movie about Facebook she thought it would be about the experience of using the web site, as with "that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness" or "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."

In short, a movie that would actually look at the human experience of real people.

Of course what she and everyone else got instead was "Mark Zuckerberg, Tech God Totally Unlike You Lowly Proletarian Trash, but Maybe Not a Perfect Person."

As for a movie that would deal seriously and intelligently with what social media has meant for humans the way Ms. Soraiya had in mind . . . I think we're still waiting on that one. And barring some extraordinary change in how Hollywood works, we'll go on waiting a long time, probably so long that by then social media as we know it will have ceased to exist and made any such effort a piece of historiography about the past, rather than a movie about the here and now.