The Social Network

This flim shows the development of Facebook, with a focus on the two lawsiuits Mark Zuckerberg, the founder,  is involved in.

Mark shows symptoms of Asperger’s, a brilliant intellect, yet showing little expression and ability to socialise and relate to other people.  In spite of that, he creates a startlingly innovative social network that the university population take to like a duck to water.  Perhaps it is because he isn’t able to unconsciously absorb the social rules that he can be more conscious of what the rules actually are, analyse them and apply them to his computer programme. 

And he seemed to be learning with each interaction.  He gets better at recognising mistakes and better at finding sensible people to give him advice.  He becomes more aware of what is appropriate self revelation on the internet and what isn’t. 

It was like he used the internet as a mirror to discover about himself those things he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see and he developed a social network which enabled the less computer literate population to do likewise.

I was left with a number of questions:

What did Mark think of this portrayal of himself?

What is Mark’s background?  There seemed to be no mention of parents or siblings.  He seemed to rely so totally on himself unlike the rich kids who were suing him. 

I felt that I would like to read the book sometime to fill in a few gaps. (The Accidental Millionaires by Ben Mezrich) but of course then there is Wikipedia, and I was able to find some of the answers there. 

When asked about the film he said he just wished no-one made a movie of him while he was still alive.  He thought what his character was wearing was accurate to the last thread, but that the past 6 years had been mainly hard work with a focus of writing the code for Facebook, not nearly as exciting as the film made it out to be.

A co-worker said that the representation of him as a socially inept nurd was overstated.  Although a  co-worker might not be the best judge of that, his background does seem to support it; he was captain of his prep school fencing team and earned a classics diploma; hardly nurd type achievements.

His dad is a dentist and his mother a psychologist.  They encouraged his gift for programming when it emerged as a child.  He has three sisters.

A well made and thought provoking film.