The Social Network Youth Film 2.0

This in-depth study of one of thetwenty-first century’s most acclaimed films, The Social Network: Youth Film 2.0 considers the contribution of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s film to the understanding of ‘youth’ in a contemporary, digital age. The book starts by situating The Social Network within the contexts of ‘youth film’, arguing that it challenges and reshapes the boundaries of this genre by rethinking the notion of ‘youth’ itself in the present century. It goes on to consider in detail the aesthetics at work in the film, arguing for its critical and reflexive use of an ‘accelerated’ audio-visual style, in order to capture both the new visual regimes of the personal computer era, and the ethical and intellectual ambiguities of Facebook itself as a creation. Finally, it locates the film within the broader visual styles and fashion codes of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century consumer culture that incorporates and commodifies rebellion and dissent: qualities that underpinned Facebook’s emerging, paradoxical identity as at once the epitome of ‘hacker’ culture and also a multi-billion-dollar global company. Reframing the meaning of youth cinema, this volume in the Cinema and Youth Culture series is ideal for students, researchers and scholars of cinema studies, youth culture and digital cultures.

Introduction Much Too Young – The Social Network and Twenty-First-Century Youth Film1 From Harvard to Palo Alto: The Values of Education in Youth Cinema and The Social Network2 Move Fast and Break Things: Ambivalences of Speed and Hacker Aesthetics3 ‘I’m CEO, Bitch’: The Conundrum of Capital4 You Don’t Get to Two Billion Friends Without Making a Few More Enemies: Critical Legacies of The Social Network Epilogue The Last Word?

Neil Archer is Senior Lecturer in Film at Keele University, UK. He is the author of seven previous books, including Cinema and Brexit: The Politics of Popular English Film (2021) and Twenty-First-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (2019).