Summary

Part II: In the Audience begins with a chapter titled, “Generation Why?” Smith muses that, although she must technically be part of Mark Zuckerberg’s generation, she and people like Zuckerberg have very different ideas of “what a person is, or should be” (45). She embarks on an analysis of The Social Network, a movie about Facebook’s inception by Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher. She notes that while the movie tries to explain Zuckerberg’s motivations with money, this does not seem to be the case in real life.

Smith observes that Zuckerberg’s answers—to why he created Facebook and why in the way that he did—are relatively banal. Unlike his screen counterpart, the real Zuckerberg is “controlled but dull, bright and clean but uniformly plain...