If you are a social media wizard, we know your best past-time would be watching any of these movies:
If you live and breathe social media and you have missed this movie, then you need to go bang your head in the wall. The Social Network is an elaborate portrayal of the life of Mark Zuckerburg from the conception of Facebook to its success with the users. What it teaches you more than anything else is that people don’t want to live a new life online, they just want the online medium as an extension of their offline life. People want to be social, even when they are alone.
Can a man fall in love with his operating system? Apparently. People have already fallen in love with their smartphones. HER is a movie about a man who tries to beat his loneliness by talking to the artificial intelligence programmed in his operating system. The movie teaches us that man is a social animal, and if people don’t provide him that socialization, perhaps machines and gadgets would.
While this movie is not specific to social media, the tech mavens can still find it really interesting as it shows the start of the digital revolution and how the idea of a computer got formulated when Britain needed to win the war against Germany. Importantly it tells us that most of the technological innovations happened due to military need and there is no reason not to imagine that the creation of social media might be born out of the same need. The conspiracy theorists can rejoice.
On the face of it, Chef seems to be a foodie movie, but it actually teaches us very powerful lessons about social media. It shows a middle-aged man losing his job and then venturing out with his young son to start his own food business in truck. His son promotes the business on Twitter and on Vine by posting random pictures of the journey and the experiences they have along the way. Soon, the business becomes a sensation on social media which ultimately drives more traffic to his food truck. The movie teaches us that social media works best when the content produced is original and unique. Copy other people’s style and you are done.
Disconnect delivers us a powerful message about the hazards of using social media extensively. Everything has its pros and cons and social media is no exception. As the saying goes; whatever you post online, stays online. With the increasing use of social networks, cyberbullying has grown tremendously too. And it is for this very reason, that our youth need to be trained on how to use social media properly.
