Social Media Goes to the Movies

I haven't had the chance to see the Facebook movie just yet, have you?  I know I should, and I'll get to it eventually, but in the meantime, I just had to share this YouTube parody video that a friend on MySpace brought to my attention:

A Twitter movie, why not?  Here's what it says over on the YouTube page, courtesy of indymogul:

If Hollywood can make an overly dramatic film about the early years of Facebook, why can't we make an overly dramatic movie about Twitter? Or at least the trailer to that movie! Check out the exclusive (parody) trailer for "The Twit Network" right here on Rated Awesome!

Seriously, though, there is something distinctive in all of this about social media and the cultural industry they represent emerging out of a college-age population. This phenomenon parallels in an interesting way how the motion picture industry in the United States emerged out of an immigrant, largely Jewish population.  According to Harold Innis, as James W. Carey has explained, monopolies of knowledge (media) lead to marginalized, excluded groups pioneering and embracing alternate modes of communication that can break the monopoly.  That's an economic metaphor, true, but it's pure media ecology.