I re-watched The Social Network last night. I hadn’t seen the film in a few years but I do recall it being a favorite of mine. I couldn’t help but think about how Facebook has changed over the years, at least from a user perspective.
If you haven’t seen the film, it’s based on the Bob Mezrich book “The Accidental Billionaires” (which I have not read), which tells the story of the founding of Facebook. Like most of these types of books and movies, who knows how much of it is accurate but that’s not really what lands with me when I watch the film.
When the film came out in 2010, I had been on Facebook for about about a year and a half. I think the delta between what Facebook was as displayed in the film, and the Facebook of 2010, was not significant. As an example, Facebook in 2004 was a desktop site for your college friends. I think the Facebook app came out around the same time as the first iPhone but I think it’s fair to say that the mobile revolution hadn’t hit the mainstream until 2012. So when you watch The Social Network, the idea of the application and how it’s presented to users wasn’t all that different from when a lot of us joined the platform.
Compare this to the Facebook we know today. I believe the following summary is fair. It’s a mostly mobile application that hasn’t landed with Gen Z users as all of the users on it are “older”. Not to mention the fact that Facebook is a subsidiary of Meta. Try telling that to someone in a movie theater in 2010.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked hard to bring down the number of people I’m “friends” with on Facebook. I’d like to limit it to what it was intended for, my family, my friends, and old friends who I don’t get to see very much anymore. I have found this makes for a much healthier Facebook experience. As tech becomes more integrated in our lives, we as users have to find ways to make it a healthy experience for us. I’m an advocate for blogs. I think blogs are a great way to get an idea out. I think sharing your blog on social media, is a good way to find the balance between creating content, and sharing it to a network.
The film is certainly worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it in some time. It felt like I was in a time machine.