South Park: "You Have 0 Friends"

South Park: "You Have 0 Friends". Season 14, episode 4 (7 April 2010). Trey Parker, director, script.

Summarized in the side-bar to the Wikipedia entry, "Stan is transported to a virtual world that is the embodiment of the social networking that occurs on Facebook. The world's look borrows from the distinctive visual style of the 1982 film Tron." In the article itself, the transportation image is described more exactly as, "After he gets fed up with Facebook, Stan tries to delete his profile but is sucked into a virtual Facebook world." I.e., the episode uses (very nicely) the standard satiric ploy of literalizing a figure of speech, in this case the cliché that a habitual user of Facebook has been sucked into the on-line world. And here that is combined with the ploy of "intertextuality": the sucking in and "virtual Facebook world" being very much in the visual style of TRON.

Note that Stan accumulates 845,323 "Facebook friends," the great majority, necessarily, unknown to him, bringing into question the degree to which a virtual friend is significantly a friend. When real-world Stan in his South Park room tries to delete his account, he "is forcibly transported by the software into the virtual world of Facebook, where he meets 'profiles' of everyone he knows who communicate in Facebook lingo, and is forced to engage in Facebook activities such as Yahtzee" (Wikipedia, as linked in the note). In the climax of the story, Stan is in a Café World party, where he confronts his Profile, a monstrous version of himself, in TRON-gladiatorial mode, with the Profile as the MCP. Note for the motif of entrapment in a kind of cyberspace (a form of VR threatening containment), handled in a comic way: Stan's gladiatorial conflict with his monstrous Profile is in Yahtzee, which Stan wins and is free. For the motif of entrapment cf. and contrast John T. Sladek's The Müller-Fokker Effect, which see, and the works linked there.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 25Mar19