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I haven’t friended famed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, so I can only guess what his status is right now. In light recent events, I would guess it's something like this:?

Aaron is writing a movie about The Face Book! L.O.L. :-).

Yes, there’s will be a Facebook movie. And yes, 47-year-old Aaron Sorkin is going to write it.

Sorkin, the brains behind TV shows like the very good “Sports Night,” the great “West Wing” and the uh... televised “Studio 60,” has been tapped by Sony to write a movie about the social networking behemoth. I had images of Tron-like special effects bonanza, featuring light cycles zipping through cyberspace, delivering pokes and important event invitations to the masses.

But that’s not the case.

The film, confirmed by New York magazine last month, will instead tell the story of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg's $16 billion crowning achievement. This recent-historical drama will make the 90's nostalgia flick The Wackness feel like Ben-Hur.

Perhaps the best part about this story is that Sorkin, by his own admittance, knows absolutely nothing about Facebook.

In the description of his Facebook group “Aaron Sorkin & The Facebook Movie,” Sorkin wrote, “I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page.” He goes on to make the claim that his grandmother knows more about the Internet than he does, and “she's been dead for 33 years.” He said he didn't actually start the group himself. He let his researcher take care of that monumental task.

Could there be a more varied job description than the one that comes with being Aaron Sorkin's researcher? One moment you're detailing the intricacies of the inner-workings of the White House, and the next you're helping the guy click the “Sign up” link on a Web site. I wonder how well it pays.

It's not difficult to imagine what the movie might look like. On “Studio 60,” where Sorkin couldn't figure out a decent way to make sketch comedy seem as important as the presidency, he decided to have a character's brother kidnapped by extremists in Afghanistan. The Facebook movie would likely have similar leaps in believability.

(Mark Zuckerberg and his female assistant walk down an endless hallway)

Zuckerberg (played, of course, by Sorkin mainstay Bradley Whitford despite his being 48 years old and balding): What's the damage?

Assistant: Mark, the people are revolting. They don't like the news feed at all. They feel it's too invasive, like they're always naked out there. They're not going to take it.

Zuckerberg: Look, we're under DIRECT ORDERS from NSA to track down these terrorists before they execute their plot to destroy every bridge in America. We need to know about every group they join, every photo they post, every game of Scrabulous they play. If we remove the News Feed, we let down the very men who founded this country.

Assistant: But didn't Ben Franklin say, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither”?

(they stop walking)

Zuckerberg: Ben Franklin never had to tangle himself in the World Wide Web.

(they make out for some reason)

All Sorkin eccentricities aside, though, it's not unreasonable to question the need or even practicality of a retrospective on a phenomenon we have yet to fully grasp. It seems like every week there's something new questioning Facebook’s effects on our daily lives, exploring whether it has dawned a renaissance in communication or destroyed face-to-face social contact forever. The story of Zuckerberg's rise to prominence is an interesting one, after he was accused of stealing much of the site's concept from classmates.

But shouldn't we wait to see whether the site fizzles out like Friendster or becomes as inherent to life as the telephone (although my grandfather still insists it's a passing fad) before canonizing it on film?

The fact that there's already a movie being made on the subject does demonstrate one effect Facebook has had on culture: We're more meta than ever before, examining every facet of our lives in detail, reminiscing about last weekend and thinking about how we're going to post photos of next weekend, all the while forgetting to actually live during the week. Our favorite subject is ourselves. The Facebook movie is a celebration of that idea.

In that spirit, even though the movie won’t be out for a few years, I already look ahead to the inevitable David Mamet YouTube play. Imagine a mascara-clad Al Pacino exclaiming, “Leave Britney alone!”

You'd pay to see that.

Nichols is an Overland Park sophomore in creative writing.

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