Justin Timberlake, who plays Napster creator and former Facebook President Sean Parker in The Social Network, recently admitted that he doesn’t use Facebook. "I’m sort of admittedly ridiculously stupid with computers,” he told Jon Stewart. “I don't have a lot of time between work. And so much of that time goes to watching SportsCenter,” Timberlake added in an interview with Extra. "I think your life is as private as you choose it to be… That's the beauty of this country, freedom of choice." It’s OK, Justin—some Facebook users have chosen not to be the biggest fans of you either, as the “I Fucking Hate Justin Timberlake” group would indicate.
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Although he plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, 27-year-old actor Jesse Eisenberg had never even seen Facebook when he read the film’s script. He did join the site for three weeks under an alias for research purposes, but Eisenberg still doesn’t have an account. Nor is he more enamored of Facebook after playing its creator. “I have to talk about myself all the time, and I’m disgusted with myself, and don’t want to go home and write about the breakfast I tried to eat,” Eisenberg told Extra of his lack of social networking interest.
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Does anybody who worked on The Social Network actually use Facebook? Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin also went on the record saying he’s not on the site, and like Eisenberg, he also seems to think people use the site mostly to talk about what they’ve eaten. “I don’t have that much to share, and when I do, I’ll call somebody and say I had a good cupcake today,” he said on The Colbert Report. “Socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality,” he added. But still, Sorkin urged Americans that involvement in the site itself is not as integral to his blockbuster film as one would imagine. “It doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook or not—love Facebook or hate Facebook,” he explained. “That is irrelevant to whether or not you’re going to enjoy this movie.”
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“I just don’t like this compulsive, instantaneous, over-information, lack-of-privacy, weirdo aspect of the world,” self-proclaimed technophobe and actress Drew Barrymore explained to The Daily Mail as to why she’s not on Facebook or Twitter. “If you meet someone, they already know everything. What about showing up on the date and saying, ‘What do you do for a living? Who are your friends?’” Perhaps Barrymore, the recent star of Going the Distance, just resents Facebook fakes from claiming she’s engaged to on-again-off-again boyfriend and co-star Justin Long.
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Hollywood charmer George Clooney isn’t just not on Facebook: He’s adamantly, passionately, not on Facebook. "I would rather have a prostate exam on live television by a guy with very cold hands than have a Facebook page,” he told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival. It seems social media doesn’t like Clooney, either, as plane crash death hoaxes about him swirled around Facebook in 2009. “We got a phone call from a friend who read it on Facebook, that’s how we found out,” Clooney’s publicist told The New York Times of the rumor. As for the actor himself, the rep added, “George quoted Mark Twain and said his death had been ‘greatly exaggerated.’ ”
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The 20-year-old Twilight star voiced her displeasure with her celebrity status, which extends to social networking sites as well. Stewart ranted about Twitter, telling Flaunt magazine, “Twitter fucks me over every day of my life. Because people go, ‘I’m sitting next to Kristen Stewart right now’ and then [the paparazzi] show up. I see people on their phones and I just want to take these cookies and throw them. It’s like ‘Get off your fucking phone and get a life!’” As for Facebook, the star doesn’t have an account there either, but the site also tries her patience. “My friends all have Facebook pages and stuff because they are normal people that can have those things,” Stewart explained. “My brother is constantly being plagued, though, because they somehow find out I'm friends with them and then the impostors try to go on and message my brother pretending they are me. Both my brother and my friends always complain to me about it."
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The lack of Facebook enthusiasm seems to run deep in the Twilight cast’s veins. Though Robert Pattinson has copped to once owning a MySpace account, he claims to no longer have any social-networking presence. Back in 2008, Pattinson was purported to have been operating a Facebook account under the alias of Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). The alleged account was reportedly hacked, with the hacker posting messages alluding to a hookup with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart (rumors that would later prove true). In 2009, a fake MySpace account led Pattinson’s management team to release the following statement: “Rob has neither an official nor personal page on MySpace, Facebook, or any other networking site. His fans should not be fooled by anyone representing themselves as Rob or claiming that they have a sanctioned Robert Pattinson site. These are all false.”
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While her ex-boyfriend John Mayer recently came to terms with his Twitter addiction, quitting the social-networking site and abandoning his 3.7 million followers, frequent tabloid target Jennifer Aniston isn’t quite so tech-savvy. “I'm really computer illiterate,” Aniston told People magazine in 2008. “When I see people on their BlackBerrys, working them like some girls work a hairdryer, I'm just stunned.” She also expressed her aversion to Facebook saying, “It's not for me. I'd be opening myself up too much. I don't want to sound like a complete innocent—I've looked at things, of course. But it's such spewing. If I look at it, I'll be affected. It's like dancing with the devil.”
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Though the premise of her hit show Gossip Girl concerns a group of elite Upper East Side teens who network with the titular gossip website, actress Blake Lively is not a fan of Facebook. When asked whether or not she was on the social-networking site, Lively told German publication In Magazine, “No, I’m not. But there are enough people who pretend to be Blake Lively. I was recently told that I had been online on Facebook. I just said “Oh God, that wasn’t even me!” In the same interview, her on-and-off-screen boyfriend Penn Badgley joined in, saying, “A few months before the start of the show, I’d stopped being on Facebook.” True love means never having to state it publicly on a social-networking website.
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He may have played a computer geek who operates a budding soft-core porn site in his breakthrough film Knocked Up, but comedian Seth Rogen is no fan of social networking. When it emerged that someone had created a fake Twitter account under his name, Rogen let the social networks have it. “That's not me on Twitter,” the actor said. “I have never partaken in any social-networking avenue on the Internet. I'm not on Facebook, I'm not on MySpace. I'm especially not on Twitter. But apparently there is a fake me on there.” Rogen added, “It's so a world I don't have anything to do with. I just think it's bullshit. Go out there and talk to people.”
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This 17-year-old pop star is not leading the technological revolution. Miley Cyrus swore off Twitter in 2009 by rapping about it on YouTube . Why? “The reasons are simple… I started tweeting bout pimples… I stopped living for moments started living for people.” Soon thereafter, the Hannah Montana actress decided to caution other young people to get off the Internet in general, describing it as “dangerous” and “kind of lame” in an interview with Movieline. “I feel like I hang out with my friends and they’re so busy taking pictures of what they’re doing and putting them on Facebook that they’re not really enjoying what they’re doing,” Cyrus explained. “You’re too busy clicking away. So I think just enjoy the moment you’re in, and stop telling people about it.”
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With this lovely British actress’s penchant for historical costume dramas like Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, it comes as no surprise that she is a bit of a Luddite. “I hate the Internet,” Knightley told The Daily Telegraph. “I find it dehumanizing to constantly check emails or social sites which have become so fashionable.” Perhaps that’s one reason why 25-year-old Knightley didn’t win the role of tech-savvy hacker Lisbeth Salander in the upcoming remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
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