Remember when it seemed like the power of the new technologies suddenly at our fingertips was limitless?
When lasers and floppy disks and modems were cutting-edge, and a whole slew of movies which took on the subject matter insisted that teenagers, especially, were capable of using these incomprehensible, futuristic phenomena to do things no one could imagine?
There’s 1982’s "Tron," in which Jeff Bridges hacks into an evil videogame corporation and gets zapped inside a world where he’s forced to participate in gladiatorial games; 1983’s "War Games," in which Matthew Broderick nearly starts World War III by hacking into a military computer; 1985’s "Real Genius," in which Val Kilmer develops a laser for a class project and then has to stop it from being used as a government weapon.
And there’s another 1985 flick, John Hughes’ "Weird Science," in which Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are two geeks desperately seeking popularity, who use a Memotech MTX 512 to create their ticket to the in-crowd: the perfect woman ...
The consistent, underlying premise of all these movies was that technology was a new, unexplored frontier, and no one could really say for sure what it could — or couldn’t — do. There was the pervading sense in this nascent motif that the new wave of personal computing had put the power to create monsters right at teenagers’ fingertips.
Now, the internet, iPhones, the rise of “digital natives” -- and nearly 30 years later, it seems our conception of the unpredictability of new technology still hasn’t really changed all that much. Neither has our sense of the preposterous monsters that teenage geeks will use it to create.
Case in point: "The Social Network."
The movie is based on Ben Mezrich’s book, "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal." In an interview on Amazon.com, Mezrich describes how the origin of the world’s largest social networking site (if Facebook were a country, it’d be the third most populated, just after China and India) began with a typically adolescent prank:
Facemash is really where it all started. It was late at night. Mark was having a few drinks ... he hacked into all of the computers at Harvard and took all of the pictures of all the girls on campus and created a “hot or not” website ... and this ended up [getting] 20,000 hits in about an hour. It froze the computer systems at Harvard. And he nearly got kicked out of school. That really was the genesis of Facebook, because for the next couple of days he thought about it, and thought, you know, “What if girls could put their own pictures up, and then we’d go and say ‘Hi’ to them, or whatever.”
