Summary: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” So goes the strapline of David Fincher’s new movie The Social Network, the dramatisation of the birth of modern social networking that chronicles the rise of Facebook from Harvard bedroom to globe-straddling corporation. It’s not quite the same message as Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto but then Facebook never claimed to have a personality. It was just a vessel for users to interact through supposedly allowing each of us to impose our personalities on the site. The Social Network movie portrays the birth of Facebook as a Shakespearian tragedy, with love, betrayal, greed and more than a few bodies left on the stage. But as we become more and more entwined with the fabric of our Facebook existence are we really being exposed to the brave new world where everything and everyone is there at our fingertips? Or are we being distracted from true engagement with the world and simply herded into appropriate marketing boxes? Are we working for the machine, turning our social lives into the greatest Tupperware party in history, or are we learning to use a freedom-enhancing tool
