America Likes Zuckerberg, “The Social Network”

“Brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching, Fincher and Sorkin have created a work of art. Audacious and funny, and ineffably beautiful; absolutely emblematic of its time and place, the best movie of the year,” said David Denby of the New Yorker about the popular film The Social Network.

Released October 1^st, 2010, The Social Network depicts Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame after he created the largest social networking site, Facebook. At nearly 600 million users, the young Zuckerberg, at just 26-years-old, could not have imagined that what he created while a sophomore at Harvard University would become this phenomenon.

Not only has Facebook itself attracted fame, but David Fincher’s The Social Network has recently been equally popular, particularly among cinema critics. Up for six Golden Globe awards, including best picture, director, screenplay, leading actor, supporting actor, and original script, the film continues to retain its status as a hit. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake, The Social Network landed on the American Film Institute’s top ten films of 2010 among other greats such as The Black Swan, Inception, Toy Story 3, The Kids are all Right, The Fighter, 127 Hours, True Grit, Writers’ Bone, and The Town.

On top of what Zuckerberg has already accomplished in just a few short years, he was recently named TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year. He was named the winner above other finalists, including the Tea Party, Harmid Karzai, Julian Assange, and the Chilean Minors.

Mark Zuckerberg is part of the last generation that will remember life before the Internet. In just seven years, Zuckerberg has created a Facebook empire that is nearly twice the size of the United States. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest.

“We have entered the Facebook Age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here,” said Lev Grossman in a TIME article. 

“For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative, and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year” concluded TIME’s Richard Stengel.