NY Times media columnist David Carr is reporting that varied reactions to The Social Network are illustrating a gap in values between the GenY/younger GenX crowd and the older GenX-boomer set.
“Many older people will watch the movie and see a cautionary tale about a callous young man who betrays friends, partners and principles as he hacks his way to lucre and fame,” Carr notes. “But many in the generation who grew up in a world that Mr. Zuckerberg helped invent will applaud someone who saw his chance and seized it with both hands, mostly by placing them on the keyboard and coding something that no one else had.
“By the younger cohort’s lights, when you make an omelet this big — half a billion users — a few eggs are going to get broken. Or as the film’s artful tag line suggests, ‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies along the way.’
“‘When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films,’ said Scott Rudin, one of the producers. ‘The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.”