Social Notworking

In the current issue of Publishers Weekly, Andrei Codrescu, poet, NPR commentator, editor of Exquisite Corpse, learned gadfly and now Luddite, urges his readers, in the style of a biblical jeremiad, to “Leave cyberspace. Go back to Ohio!” (“Promote This! Forget Facebook,” PW, 1/31/11). “Oh, but woe is unto us!” he exclaims. “The social networks aren’t selling books! They are giving away stupid prose for free!” Being friendly is not the way to sell books, Codrescu argues. “Not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.” For Codrescu, Facebook is not even a good place for writers to search for material. “Even if a novelist, let’s say, mined a social network for stories, he’d find nothing but lies and fake grins. There would be no smells and no skin.” Codrescu’s point about the one-dimensional view of human personality perpetuated in the pages of Facebook and other social networks is something that is also discussed by Zadie Smith in her recent essay/review in The New York Review of Books of the film The Social Network and of Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget (“Generation Why,” NYRB, 11/25/10). Smith, who foreswore Facebook after just two months of status updates, writes, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Sensibility.” Bravo Andrei and Zadie! Let’s have a Fahrenheit 451 moment in which all the iPads and Kindles are burned, in which hedge funders short Facebook and in which friends parse each others’ essence through the complex characters in the novels they browse in their local independent bookstores.

The Social Network

Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." "Style is content" is another shibboleth of the modernist movement, which began to recognize that context—the way in which the images and text that make up so-called content are ingested and regurgitated—is as important as the content itself. Think about what you remember when you recall a movie or television show and it will soon become apparent that style outweighs the message. You may not remember the plot of The Manchurian Candidate or Psycho, but you will surely remember the paranoiac style. This emphasis on cultural context is at the heart of the deconstructionist view of literature, in which texts are value-free products of the psychosocial moments that produce them. Thus it is a curiosity that The Social Network, which purports to deal with the latest revolution of the Internet medium, a revolution which some experts believe is tantamount to the invention of email itself, is such an anachronism. The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, whose Seven was one of the most terrifying essays of style of its decade, approaches its subject almost entirely in terms of gossipy content of the litigious variety (the plot is structured around the suits that have been filed against Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, by three of his Harvard classmates, the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, who helped found the company). Facebook may have been started as a dating site (with gossip correctly identified by Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay, as the grist for its mill), but its implications have phenomenological consequences that far exceed any of the intentions delineated in Fincher’s movie, which is full of girls at parties in Cambridge and Palo Alto drinking too much and taking off their clothes. Not the least of the concerns is the nature of personality itself. The concept of transparency, which Facebook introduces into the cyber universe, runs in direct contradiction to the previous anonymity of Internet life, with its avatars and screen names. Facebook presents human personality as a series of surfaces defined by preferences that become apparent from the consuming habits of its members. The comparison between the view of personality that Facebook espouses and that of modern depth psychology, with its notion of unconscious life, is equivalent to the comparison between the kind of language philosophy advocated by a different set of Cambridge thinkers, almost a century ago, and the metaphysics propounded by German idealist philosophers in places like Freiberg, Marburg and Heidelberg centuries before that. Sadly, The Social Network totally trivializes the significance of the revolution it heralds.