By LYNN HIRSCHBERG | W MAGAZINE
In 2008, when Aaron Sorkin read the 13-page proposal for a book that would attempt to detail the birth of Facebook, he stopped at page three and called his agent. It wasn’t the allure of the Internet that captured his attention—Sorkin, who created and wrote 88 episodes of The West Wing and films like The American President, had moderate disdain for the Internet, viewing it as a land of vastly overempowered amateurs. Bloggers had attacked his last TV show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in 2007, and he had questioned their credentials, saying “everybody has a voice—the thing is, everybody’s voice oughtn’t be equal...nothing has done more to make us dumber or meaner than the anonymity of the Internet.”
