Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers was one of the first to beat the “Social Network is the film of a generation” drum. His quote found its way into the film’s marketing and spawned several instances of online chatter such as our articles here and here. And now, Travers has finally responded to one alternative opinion, but not any of those from his peers. Nope, instead he saw an opportunity for a few more clicks and a bit more attention when Joseph Gordon-Levitt took him to task on his blog.
“[On] behalf of we who are inheriting a new earth connected by the Internet, I must raise my hand to say that while Mr. Fincher’s Facebook drama certainly nails a lot of today’s more ominous trends, this story only tells half of our tale,” Gordon-Levitt wrote.
In Travers’s response we find what I believe to be the true misconception not of The Social Network, but of the generation Travers believes it’s defining. He writes:
What’s “defining” about The Social Network is the way it shows a generation losing touch with its humanity. The satire in Sorkin’s script isn’t aimed at what you call the “cool kids,” the “creative, non-narcissistic” users of the Internet who don’t use “friend” as a verb. They are in the minority. Who’s the majority? Go to any multiplex to see a movie — I just came back from Sundance — and you’ll see a lightshow of iPhones and Blackberrys at every performance. Not before or after the movie, but during. The guy next to me (from your generation) was checking his e-mail and updating his Facebook status. No apology. No shame. He just shot me a look. Like I wasn’t there. Like the audience wasn’t there. Like it was just him and a glowing screen.
To begin, Travers’s idea of who is in the minority and who is in the majority is WAY off base if you ask me.
I’ll start with his example, that being the “lightshow of iPhones and Blackberrys” at movie screenings. I’ll push aside the fact he’s saying this happened at Sundance where he was sitting in a small theater filled with industry types looking to buy films and likely texting to their peers their thoughts on whatever they were watching before rudely walking out (such is the culture at any major film festival). So let’s just address this idea that the majority of the generation Travers says The Social Network is defining are the people who go to theaters and whip out their cell phones and begin texting and/or updating their Facebook status during a movie. Can this possible be his argument?
Maybe watching movies is different where Travers comes from but in my world maybe one person every two or three movies will light up their cell phone and if I’m sitting next to them I’ll ask them to turn it off, as I would assume most of my generation or any generation would do. This is hardly a majority.
Of course, Travers is speaking to the idea of a world where we are all increasingly digitally connected, and face-to-face time is decreasing. His example is just a poor one. He’s assuming that with so many people staying in touch over social networks such as Facebook and Twitter actual human interaction time in the lives of those people has diminished. I’m not sure if he’s done a poll to come to this conclusion or not, but he seems to be making the case either way. And maybe I would agree with him if every street corner didn’t have a coffee shop that wasn’t filled to capacity with people socializing and interacting.
Gordon-Levitt addresses Travers’s digital isolation theory in his post saying, “This generation, my generation, we are reaching out to each other, communicating with one another, and creating a shared world in ways no prior generation could have.” He then adds, “Yes, you could focus on the friend-counting narcissists, but you could also focus on countless meaningful relationships formed across national borders and cultural boundaries that would have been logistically impossible before sites like Facebook.”
The point Gordon-Levitt is making is sound especially in comparison to Travers’s “lightshow” theory. Let me offer a comparison by putting it this way, if you’re having a debate with 20 people and two of those people are screaming at the top of their lungs it doesn’t mean the opinion of those two is the majority opinion, they’re just the loudest. The same goes for the people Travers noticed using their cell phones in a darkened movie theater. They aren’t the majority, they’re just more noticeable.
So, in this way does The Social Network actually define a generation? Can anyone actually say it defines any single generation? Strangely, Travers finally admits The Social Network isn’t even about this defining aspect, noting the film isn’t even about Facebook, which is exactly what I said in my own review of the film, writing, “Sorkin uses this dispute over intellectual property as the focus of the story, not Facebook itself… Instead of focusing on a phenomenon that now has over 500 million active users, the film focuses on one man’s drive and ambition for success and social status. Then again, it’s much more difficult to craft a narrative around the driving force of a generation than to do what Fincher does best and zero in on a single target.”
Travers addresses Gordon-Levitt saying:
You say that The Social Network only tells half the story. I think it tells less than that. The movie really isn’t about Facebook at all. We hardly see anyone use it. It’s about the exploitation of a groundbreaking technology for profit. And if that technology is invasive or isolating to friendships, screw it. Where’s the new social network that will make billions by invading our dreams? There’s another recent movie that attacked that issue brilliantly. It’s called Inception, and you’re in it.
So, yes, Facebook is a force of a new generation, but it in no way defines it. We aren’t defined by the tools we use, we are defined by what we do with them. Barack Obama owes so much of his Presidential campaign to social networks and, as it has been pointed out many times, Facebook has helped people band together for thousands of causes all across the world. What Travers says is true, The Social Network tells less than half the story, less than half the story of a tool used by the generation he says it defines.
There seems to be this thought process from many people online that they travel in a pack of the majority. That everyone is on the Internet and that everyone is participating in message boards and comment threads. It’s just not true.
People use the Internet for any number of reasons, all of them different. Facebook says that of the 6.7 billion people on earth over 500 million of them have a Facebook profile and approximately half of those people log in daily. This tells me approximately 3% of the world’s population uses Facebook on any given day. So what is the other 97% of the population doing? Looking for a wifi hotspot?
