I can’t tell you how happy this video makes me feel. It’s like they looked at Spike Jonze’s Fat Boy Slim music video and wondered, “how can we make it better?” Not that that video isn’t bad, it’s just, well, outdated.

I’ll never forget my experiences in the 120 degree heat in villages of Senegal Africa. The tribes of people burn the ground to create fertilized soil which enables them grow peanuts and cashews. Or Bangladesh, where 150 million people are condensed into a country the size of Iowa. A video like this makes me realize how our world culture is so consumed by growth and materialism, we have forgotten tribes like this still exist off the Earth. What a rare piece of insight, to see humans living entirely off the land:

Jesse Eisenberg’s character qualifies as showing signs of many DSM-IV psychiatric conditions including adult antisocial personality disorder, Asperger’s, ADHD, and narcissistic personality disorder. But on the other hand, he defined a socially connected world where those behaviors are acceptable or at least accepted. If you examine our behavior behind the screen we feel comfortable acting in any way we can because nobody can see us and we have some sense of safety in that we can’t see them. We can’t see them crying, or feeling hurt. So Eisenberg’s behavior is actually acceptable online but unacceptable in person and is precisely what we’re seeing exhibited now behind one of the many screens countless hours each day. Teens send 4,000 texts a month; they Facebook, IM, game and spend their days (and nights) connecting electronically. One in 12 people worldwide are on Facebook including nearly all teens and young adults and even more than half of online Baby Boomers. Everybody wants to talk about why we are antisocial, why we seem to be ADHD, why we seem to have these obsessive/compulsive behaviors of checking our phones all day long. We are being encouraged to exhibit symptoms of many psychological disorders. Take, for example, stereotyped and repeated use of language or idiosyncratic use of language; doesn’t that describe what we do online? That’s one sign of Asperger’s.
Eisenberg is acting in a way that presaged how we behave on social networks. He played Mark Zuckerberg exactly how we see people in our research acting online. Online, people are often abrupt, callous and nasty, and we accept it.
The opening scene was exquisite in showing how Zuckerberg had no clue how to have a face-to-face, interpersonal conversation. I think that scene said everything about why he created ways to communicate online rather than face to face.
Larry Rosen, Ph.D., a professor of child psychology at California State U, is author of “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn” and other books.