Pop Culture Diary: The Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups - 'The Social Reckoning,' the Real-Life Inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, More

What I've Been Into...

"The Social Reckoning" Aaron Sorkin's second film, after 2010's "The Social Network," examining the tactics and effects of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, is fleet and entertaining but fails to deliver the coup de grâce promised in its title.

The film's opening sequence, focusing on a confrontation between an influencer and the police and how quickly it gets out of hand, is powerful and effective, demonstrating how social media feeds and amplifies our worst behaviors and spreads them to others like a deadly infection.

But from there the film settles into becoming a fairly routine legal procedural: Crusading reporter with a hunch meets a whistleblower with inside information, which, once revealed, comes back to, sort of, bite the bad guy.

The cast — Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg and, especially,Mikey Madison as whisleblower Frances Haugen — is brilliantly captivating and Sorkin's modern day screwball pitter-patter dialogue is fun, yet the film fails to pay off.

This is partially because, in real life, Zuckerberg and Facebook never got entirely on the hook, let alone had to wriggle off it. The unsurprising revelation that the site's engineers goosed the service's algorithm to feed people's prejudices and outrage in order to attract more views essentially resulted in a hand slap that never really stung.

Zuckerberg and others in the ad platform industry haven't been at all chastened by bad publicity, fines or legislation. They just get sneakier and the public continues to flock to their sites with an insatiable appetite for outrage.

Social media and its tactics now routinely get compared to those of the tobacco industry, and there's been alarm about its impact on children, and there have been some changes to platforms as a result. But tobacco isn't any safer to older lungs than it is to young ones, and the same thing applies to brains.

Sorkin's film does a good job of uncovering the manipulative techniques the social networks use to capture and retain our attention, and the harm that can result, but it fails to explain the roots of our addiction.

What's the source of the emptiness in our society, and in ourselves, that drives our need for attention and acknowledgement to the point where we're willing to give up our personal information, our privacy, our attention spans, our free time and our grasp of reality in search of likes and shares?

Maybe that's Sorkin's third part of the trilogy: "The Social Addiction."

Reads:

Via Smithsonian: An investigation of Joseph Bell, the real-life surgeon who inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes.

In addition to his work as a surgeon, Bell assisted the Scottish police with multiple criminal investigations, making significant contributions to the burgeoning field of forensic science.

From the moment Conan Doyle began studying under Bell at the University of Edinburgh in 1878, he was struck by his professor’s superhuman diagnostic methods, immortalized in many anecdotes passed among students. When a young doctor determined that a patient with a limp was suffering from a disease of the hip joint, Bell immediately scoffed, “Hip—nothing!” He went on: “Were you to observe closely, you would see that there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoes where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns, gentlemen.”

But Bell instinctively knew that this patient had not come to the hospital to seek help for his feet. “This is a case of chronic alcoholism,” he explained. “The rubicund nose; the puffed, bloated face; the bloodshot eyes; the tremulous hands and twitching face muscles … all show this. These deductions, gentlemen, must, however, be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence. In this instance, my diagnosis is confirmed by my seeing the neck of a whiskey bottle protruding from the patient’s right-hand coat pocket.”