Zadie Smith, commenting on Mark Zuckerberg’s “philosophy”:
“Connection is the goal”
Connections. A network of connections. Being connected. Networks. Again: to connect, to become part of the network. Designers, housewives, photographers, carpenters, teachers, people from all walks of life, converging on the same image: a net, a bundle of connections. All of them identified connections as an iconic, shared representation. “The net”, “to connect”, “to get connected”, ”to get into new connections”. In each and every single prototyping and ideation workshop that we organized during the last year, the net was always there. It didn’t matter if people were younger or older, PhDs or shopkeepers: they identified “connecting” as what expressed recent changes in their lives best. Plain people understood and represented very well the different levels of connections in the real and virtual worlds, the weak connections, the strong connections, the fake connections, the ambiguity of “connecting” in social networks. They have integrated this category, as it seems. Are connections the iconic form that emerges as the symbol of our culture?.
A participant explains what is in and around virtual and real networks of people.
After so much time being immersed in these hands-on experiences with people, it came as a bit of a shock to read how Zadie Smith analyzed the film “The Social Network”. She started by affirming what, in her view, represented a real change in cultural processes. Instead of becoming writers, artists, painters, politics, or filmmakers a whole generation expressed a culture, silently “wiring themselves in”:
Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world. World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: How can I do it? Zuckerberg solved that one in about three weeks.
And then she goes on and on and on with clichés about nerds, geeks, how bad weak connections are, etc. etc. etc. One feels a nostalgic lament all along the whole text. It feels like an old academic looking on popular culture in sorrowful disdain. But Zadie Smith is young.
Is this nostalgic lament a consequence of relating to the world only through the literary stance? But even so, there seems to be a disconnection with the presence of the net in the world around “texts”. What about “texts with nets”?: Latour, Castells, or, as precursors, Deleuze and Guattari?. Even Zizek and Negri. Sloterdijk orbits about connections and networks. Nets, ANTs, Rhizomes, they have been there for a long time. I wonder if the disconnection that is evident in this text is representative of a way to relate to the world. I mean, what is the value of reading without testing? Without venturing out to the street?
I don’t know exactly what this emergence of “connection” in the public imagination really means. It requires interrogation, inquiry, informed opinion. Or just asking people through a systematic effort. Zadie Smith dismisses Zuckerberg as “autistic”. Conceded, he seems to be the archetype of the isolated nerd (specially as he is portrayed in the film). How should we label the archetype that Zadie Smith is representing, if she represents any, then?.
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