Facebook goes to the movies

The rise of Facebook as a cultural phenomenon meant that it would inevitably become a subject for cinema. Yet it is not easy to use social networking as a vehicle for narrative film. Facebook might be a hot phenomenon, but it is a ‘cool’ form of media. The detached intimacies among Facebook members don’t easily translate to the big screen, nor do the big ethical questions that drove films like ‘Network’, ‘All the President’s Men’ or even ‘The Truman Show’ resonate because the ‘public’ doesn’t exist for social networking like it does for the television, radio or newspaper. Moreover, the maintenance of Facebook pages mimics the kinds of knowledge work many of us do on a daily basis, and cinema has always struggled to represent intellectual labour on screen. So when two films ‘about’ Facebook – the Hollywood produced ‘The Social Network’ and the independent ‘documentary’ ‘Catfish’ – receive critical and popular acclaim, it is worth asking what happens when social networking meets the cinema.