The divide between Hollywood and Silicon Valley grew even wider this weekend with a backlash online and in new media circles against Sony’s critically beloved and thus far successful drama about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “The Social Network.
In a lead story on the tech blog Venturebeat, the headline told the story: “Hollywood Gets It Wrong,” it read, over a still from the movie.
But that’s not the only complaint that’s being leveled at the movie, which has been enthusiastically embraced by highbrow critics from Roger Ebert to Manohla Dargis.
The movie “is not interested in the concept of social networking or the actual usage of Facebook,” wrote HufPo contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas. “The film represents the biggest culmination yet of old media’s disdain and misreading of new media.”
Wrote new media blogger Jeff Jarvis: “The Social Network makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It says the internet is not a revolution, but the creation of a few odd machine-men — it’s the revenge on the revenge of the nerds.”: (Jeff Jarvis: The Antisocial Movie)
Vargas told TheWrap he considers the movie “irresponsible,” since the Hollywood impression of Facebook and Zuckerberg is quite likely to be enshrined as our culture’s conventional wisdom, regardless of how inaccurate it may be.
“There’s something that feels quite dated and very 1990s about all of this, like the filmmakers never bothered to meet some of the geeksters — geeks and hipsters — at Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. who fuel the social media renaissance in Silicon Valley,” he complains.
True or not, where “The Social Network” misses the point is that it is ostensibly about the greatest communications revolution since moveable type.
And yet viewers come away with no sense of how Facebook users actually do communicate. And so what was supposed to be a zeitgeist movie is, instead, a vehicle for elite Hollywood’s talents to blithely, if unwittingly, demonstrate how out-of-touch they are with what’s going on out there.
Geek movie reviewers miss the point that the movie is not about the Internet or about Facebook but the creepy people involved. You don’t need a Facebook page to understand people. The movie is about people not faces..
Moody Eye View 