Media Meditation #4

So I went to see The Social Network the other day. It's a good movie a bit overdramatized in some parts but overall Jesse Eisenburg can really capture the essence of Zuckerburg. What I really like about the movie is that essentially he had no intention of even creating facebook it seemed to be a mishap of sorts, a bad date with a girl, alcohol, and then coming home drunk to his dorm and wanting to exact his revenge on her decides hey why don't I take her picture and put next to another girls photo and send it out to the people in my dorm and thus facesmash was born. He sees how popular this idea becomes and decides hey I could take all the photos in our facebook and put it on the web and send it out to people and thus facebook was born. Unfortunately when you make 500 million friends your bound to make a few enemies along the way and no more is this more clear when his own friend turns against him and sues him. It really delves into the heart of the issue which is does facebook really improve communication or is it just a means of bypassing it? Sure you can  meet people more efficently  but you haven't taken out the human equation which is basically people can still lie, cheat, and fanagle their way around online as well. Are they really your friends when they click that button or are they just an imposter? It seems that the movie brings up another key point that the more connected we are with people especially through the means of online communication the more narcisstic people become. This is aparently true with online social networking sites such as facebook where it is just seemingly one big me fest how many friends can I get? How many more friends can I get then other people? How beautiful, handsome is my profile picture? How many times should I be updating my profile picture? It seems that a website created for connecting and socializing with other people seems extremely focused on nothing other than greed and narcissism which in a way makes sense because Zuckerburg himself created the website out of spite for his date.

http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg?v=wall