Saturday, November 13, 2010

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

The final paragraph of a lengthy review of “The Social Network” and You Are Not a Gadget.  Okay, I need to go spend the rest of the day off-line now…

At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon." - I find the imagery of the dead squirrel immensely captivating but I don't understand the cultural references in the first sentence and last sentence of the paragraph. I am doing an analysis of the rhetorical technqiues Zadie Smith uses in her article to advance her argument. Seeing as you also read her article, could you help me with this part? What did you think she tried to mean in "I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused" - and the cultural reference --> " Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon."

Thanks so much for your help,

Jonathan

pbokelly said...

I think it's fairly self-explanatory, except perhaps for the dead squirrel tangent...