The Social Network comes to Gettysburg

By Liz Williams

Last weekend, CAB held its first movie night of the year, screening The Social Network on Friday and Saturday nights in The Junction. Directed by David Fincher, the 2010 film tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook, as he developed and launched the wildly popular online social network during his time at Harvard.

College students today are masters of the web. As the only generation to have grown up alongside the internet, we  have incorporated its features into our daily lives. Photos no longer end up in leather-bound photo albums stashed onto bookshelves at home. They appear online, on Facebook pages, neatly positioned between a list of “Friends” and a slew of personal information.

Facebook.com, the second most visited website on the internet, was launched in February 2004 and has since evolved into a standard of communication and online interaction, boasting over 600 million active users.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and current CEO and president of Facebook, has become an icon of pop culture around the world. In The Social Network, his character is played by Jesse Eisenberg, who portrays Zuckerberg as a nerdy, isolated, and socially awkward teenager. This image, however, may not be completely accurate. Time magazine, which named Zuckerberg “Person of the Year” for 2010, reports that he is just the opposite.

Whatever Mark Zuckerberg’s true character may be, The Social Network is definitely a film worth watching. The movie has already won numerous awards and is currently nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year at the 2011 Oscars. In addition to its success at the box office, over 120,000 people already “like” The Social Network on Facebook—and that’s how you know it’s good.