When I teach my Management and Narrative course, I always use films about the most consequential sectors of the economy. Information technology invariably qualifies. I sometimes face a tradeoff between including aging classics or more relevant new arrivals. For many years, the standard IT story was about startups, usually successful ones. A book is the best vehicle for such a story. But the problem trying to tell such a story in a film is that it often lacks the conflict and drama required to hold the viewer’s attention. When writing “Insanely Great: The Dominant IT Fable,” the chapter about IT in our book Negotiating Business Narratives, co-author Beth Herst and I found out that there were more books than films expressing this fable.

Depositions as Drama

The one IT startup film that stands out is The Social Network (2010), directed by David Fincher with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Towards the end of the film, Sorkin puts into the mouth of one of his characters his own storytelling methodology: “In every creation story there has to be a devil.” In the case of The Social Network, the conflict that propels viewer interest is the deposition-taking for lawsuits by former Facebook partners Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss brothers against Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve taught The Social Network for many years and students have enjoyed it. But I grew dissatisfied with it because it has become dated, both in terms of its pervasive techno-optimism and its techno-bro sexism and denial of female agency.

The recent film BlackBerry (2023) has been a good alternative, because its storyline includes not only the startup soaring into the heavens but also crashing back down to earth. In a Canadian classroom, it’s a plus to have a film made by Canadians about a Canadian experience.

When Aaron Sorkin’s new film The Social Reckoning recently dropped, I rushed to see it to determine if it would fit into my curriculum.

Meaningful Social Interaction?

The zeitgeist has now shifted away from celebrations of tech founders and their firms. There is now so much to hate about the IT firms: the affordance of social media as a forum for propaganda, radicalization, and lies; the obscene wealth of the tech founders, protected by the US tax code; the massive political influence of the tech industry, especially in the US, where politicians openly sell influence; and most recently the catastrophic potential of artificial intelligence.

Sorkin chose to stay with Facebook and to examine the evils of social media, as exemplified by Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to prioritize what Facebook calls “meaningful social interaction,” or posts that provoke strong emotional reaction (a.k.a. ragebait). Sorkin tells his story by choosing as his protagonists Frances Haugen, a whistleblower at Facebook, and Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal writer who published Haugen’s revelations in his series The Facebook Files. This puts Sorkin’s film within another genre I discuss, investigative journalism. The film is a procedural about a source and a journalist working together to expose corporate wrong-doing and having a measure of success in forcing the corporation to reform. Their revelations were instrumental in Meta’s recent settlement with American state governments entailing $17 billion in compensation and, more importantly, limits on social media use by minors.

My Tomatometer

The Social Reckoning has had very mixed reviews – only 45 percent approval among top critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Some critics found the presentation of the issue academic and pedantic, Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of the middle-aged Mark Zuckerberg robotic and unappealing, the flirtatious chemistry between Haugen and Horowitz cliched, the result of the investigative journalism a small win but hardly a game changer, the problem of social media’s toxicity dated, and even the sets dull and institutional.

Beth Herst and I have also written about investigative journalism films, and we have an ongoing interest in that genre. It doesn’t bother me, as it does some of the critics, that The Social Reckoning morphed from techno-dystopia, an as-yet-undefined genre, to one that is well known. I often use classics in my classroom – for example the original (1957) version of Twelve Angry Men – but they are not the only films I use. I assign films to teach about both management and narrative and to stimulate student discussion. The Social Reckoning has the advantage that it covers both the current disenchantment with IT firms and the investigative journalism that exposes their failings. While waiting for a techno-dystopia film that becomes a classic, I would be comfortable adding The Social Reckoning to my curriculum.

Though The Social Reckoning is not a sequel to The Social Network, it does make us think about how Mark Zuckerberg’s original vision of creating enjoyable connections among people has scaled up to become a pernicious presence in our lives.