Flying Seeds

Think about David Fincher’s reasoning for titling his Facebook founder biopic the way he did. Why not The Accidental Billionaires, after the book on which it was based? Or, why not simply Zuckerbergit’s catchy enough. Instead, the title immediately lets us know what is at the heart of the storythe connections that Mark Zuckerberg makes (and breaks) to get to the top of the web. These include the Winklevoss twins who supposedly came up with the first idea for Facebook, Eduardo Saverin who helped finance the project, and Sean Parker, who helped advise Zuckerberg and was president of Facebook, Inc. before being arrested for cocaine possession.Zuckerberg and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz have publicly stated that the movie is mostly fictional. In a way, that makes it an even better representation of the social media age. Everything is about how we present ourselves to other people, and how Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other social media websites help us do that. Is the advent of more detail online (for example, geo-location sites like Foursquare which track users’ movements) bringing us closer to reality online, or simply making it more difficult to tell? (more…)