Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in December and his upfront portrait photo on the cover echoed the upfront portrait photo of the "Social Network" movie poster. Though both show well-groomed guys in their 20s, there's something a bit creepy about the shots; a stark flatness highlights a lack of nuance, a curious absence of darkness. Which is pretty much how you can sum up the digital social-network world. So far, so apt.
In the movie and in the Time interview, Zuckerberg is drawn as an individual who has no truck with concepts such as sadness or failure. Is Zuckerberg so fragile that he can't stand to be burned, causing him to fashion an impenetrable protective armor to guard against the yuckiness of reality?
Maybe. Still, that would be too familiar, even banal. In the real-life interview and in the (almost) fictional film, Zuckerberg professes himself uninterested in things that don't grab at his synapses in the right way, real fast. This is the guy who launched Facebook from his Harvard University dorm room in February 2004 when he was 19, and went on from there in seven short years to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the globe. One in every dozen people on the entire planet now has a Facebook account and, at this point, Zuckerberg is worth more than Apple bigwig Steve Jobs. Clearly, he has no time to waste on things that don't interest him.