Dave Eggers wrote The Circle, a novel about social networking and the human spirit. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal picks through what sounds like a forest of shopworn clichés–people tweeting their food, livestreaming being the next big thing, lives driven by social media metrics–and wonders at the general naiveté and cluelessness of it all.
I've never encountered anyone who is so dumb and unthinking about social media as roughly all the characters in this book. Middle schoolers tend to have a more nuanced understanding of "openness" and "transparency" on the Internet than Eggers' characters.
… For me, the truest sign that Eggers is not writing about something he understands is that he places livestreaming video at the very heart of what The Circle does. Almost no one watches livestreams of anything except the Occupy protests, Apple keynotes, puppies, and sports. When Holland becomes the company's public face, Eggers would have us believe that literally millions of people would follow a corporate PR representative around a company campus. It's credibility shaking not because he gets the tech market wrong, but because it shows that he doesn't understand people's motivations.
The Circle could be filmed by Wes Anderson, re-imagining the Internet as something that happened right after World War II and was all about fresnel lenses and stuff, causing youngsters to become consumed by French existentialism. Bruce Willis stars as 1950s Evgeny Morozov. Eggers writes a novelization of the movie of his novel, and it is significantly longer than the original.
