Will the real Mark Zuckerberg please stand up?

Last week I read The Rumpus' Elissa Bassist's "review" (or rather, mockery) of the film, The Social Network. You may have heard of the film by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin (that guy from Entourage) about the Harvard student who creates an online social network that rises to fame overnight; also known as Facebook - which you have probably heard of unless you have been trapped in a mine for the last five years.

I have to admit, the movie is pretty damn entertaining; even if Bassist is totally spot-on that the film is loaded with testosterone and belittles the woman's role in social revolution: "Women are there to blow the dick, excite the dick, but not wield the dick." Much of the film consists of hot, oversexed Asian women throwing themselves at Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and his fellow entrepenuers, including one scene in a bathroom stall where Jesse's character's pants drop to the floor and his date gets down on her knees (don't get too excited guys, all you see are her stilettos and his jeans around his ankles). Later in the film, there is another scene in which two young girls are taking rips from a five-foot bong while men sit "wired in" at computers, building what is to become the most successful website of our generation.

Sorkin paints a picture of a sex-obsessed asshole who uses his vast computer knowledge to make something "cool" - even if it means stealing ideas from other programmers, comparing his ex-girlfriend to a farm animal, shamelessly pushing his best friend out of their company and showing up to an investors meeting in a bathrobe and slippers. The Mark Zuckerberg that viewers experience in The Social Network is cold, arrogant and somewhat aloof.

I've never met Mark Zuckerberg, but I have a lot of friends who work with him at Facebook who say he's nothing like the guy that Sorkin depicts in the film. I read the article in New Yorker that was written a couple of weeks ago, which I felt was a pretty non-biased description of Zuckerberg and the evolution of his success. In one sense, he's just a nerdy guy who's made some lucky business decisions. On the other hand, he's one of the youngest billionaires in the world and you don't just get there by being lucky. He has a vision of what he wants Facebook to become:

"Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching “Entourage,” and that your parents taped “60 Minutes” for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends—and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently—will be right there."

While I might not agree with the idea of doing things solely because your friends are doing them, I think he makes a valid point in that people are attracted to the same things that their friends are - why else would we be friends with them?

I think back to the days in my freshman dorm room at Washington University in St. Louis when my friend's older brother (a senior at Princeton) urged us to join TheFacebook.com, as our school was the twelfth university to be added to the exclusive network. We were in the middle of finals and the only thing we could concentrate on was this silly website where you could add friends and see their photo, interests and what classes they were taking. There was no messaging, no walls, no photos... nothing that Facebook has today - except for the Poke, which I still use every so often when I am trying to remind people what Facebook used to be. Don't get me wrong; I love where it's taken us and I'm excited to see where it's going. My generation is defined by communication, and I believe that Facebook is the most efficient means of online communication. That is, for people that use it as regularly as I do.