The Social Network: A fictional throwback to the modern digital world

The Social Network (2010) narrates story of how Facebook was found and the associated controversies. I was grade 10 when the movie was released and Facebook was the most prominent social website back then among the teenagers in Singapore. The movie, when I first watched back then, was a huge inspiration to me and many other friends. In the movie, Zuckerberg first created an anonymous page that rates beauty of fellow female students in Harvard which was deemed as a "prank" then. It laid the foundation ground for the empire later on. This got me thinking that ideas are generated from such pranks in life. What is important for someone to actually come up and refine ideas is that one ought to take action first no matter what. Zuckerberg also once said ideas are never solidified and completed in the beginning; initial ideas are mere sketches which get lined, penned and colored through care and time.

To think that digital media empire Facebook was sparked off from an unethical-female-student-rating website, would Facebook have existed if such rating website was created by a random Emory student right now? In the extremely sensitive and political-correctness-obsessed world we are living in right now, probably not. In 2003, not everyone had access to the website created by Zuckerberg; only the Harvard graduate. In 2017, where everything gets snapped, instagramed, reported and shared on social media, an emergence of such website would not have been tolerated. Of course I disagree with such website, it is morally wrong. However, we should think whether such sensitive-and-hate-prone digital world we are living in right now provide sufficient room for other great ideas like Facebook in the future?