I came across a website that awards the ten best "long form" (a term I don't recall hearing when I went to college) articles to appear each year. In the process, I discovered this fantastic article with the title "Generation Why." It's all about The Social Network, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and a book I've just got to read titled You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jason Lanier.
Author of the article, Zadie Smith, teaches English at Harvard and actually was around when some events portrayed in the film occurred. Although just nine years older than Zuckerberg, Smith says he feels part of a different generation. In a nutshell, the newer generation, People 2.0 as he calls them, tend to live virtually, while his and earlier generations, People 1.0, lived and related, well, the way people did before Facebook.
To pique your interest further, I leave this final sentence from the article: "The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called 'Mark Zuckerberg.' It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore."
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