I have yet to see The Social Network, though I've read a number of the glowing reviews and have found myself impressed by the trailer. In short, I certainly want to see it.
What makes this compelling to write about, for me anyway, is that while the internet has, in the strictest sense, literally been around for forty years, the social networking phenomenon in any form remotely recognizable as related to what we have now has only been around for the last ten or fifteen years at the very most. I didn't think we'd have a movie about it, at least not a biographical one, quite so soon.
It figures Facebook would be the one to make the big leap first. As an FB user, I think everything that came before it basically just pales in comparison in terms of sheer user-friendliness. That may be a good or a bad thing, but the point is that whereas Friendster, Myspace, Multiply or even the lesser known sites like Tubely seemed to have reached their limit in terms of public interest, with Friendster (which seems to have been mainly a hit in the Philippines) having peaked a few years back and with Myspace having been effectively supplanted by FB as the "in" social network among Americans, FB just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. And it's the only network that's had a movie made about it.
No wonder a lot of sites tie up with FB, even Twitter which I really don't care much for; it's kind of a matter of survival, I would think. Facebook, and social networking in general, has been effectively woven into the social fabric.
Now, this has gotten me thinking.
I can't help but wonder: with so much of our lives online, from our journals to our picture albums, what happens if the whole thing, one day, just up and crashes? I mean it's so much more convenient to chuck our pictures into cyberspace than actually stock up on photo albums, and to type down our thoughts (like I'm doing right now) than to actually write stuff down in a journal. Books, comic books, music albums are all available online for download into our handheld appliances, many of which have set expiry dates.
I've been telling my wife for years that we have to start putting our pictures into albums. Back when we first got married, we used to do just that, but since we got started on digital pictures, it's all been about saving stuff onto a CD or onto a hard drive. Considering we've had our hard-drives reformatted more than once, that's a kind of risky proposition, really. I'm talking about really wonderful memories here, like our family's trip to Bohol and Cebu three years ago. Sure, photoalbums can get lost in fire and flood, but to my digital storage media is a lot more fickle because God only knows how long photobucket will be around or what virus could take gmail out.
There's something more, though, and it's not about being resistant to technology. There's a warmth, dare I say it, to sitting with one's family around an old album, as opposed to just admiring something on a screen and clicking "like." It's great for sharing these precious recollections with people one cannot see everyday, but when a family such as mine doesn't have any pictures more recent than 2004, the time to start investing in some photo albums has definitely come.
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