Is "The Social Network" the "Wall Street" of the 2000s?

In the movie "Wall Street", Oliver Stone captures the excesses of the 1980s "Corporate Raider", distilling the essence of that character down to Gordon Gecko.  Gecko is a self-made man, in control of his fate, and lives a life more exciting and wealthy than any of us can hope to lead.

Stone intended Wall Street to be a cautionary tale, about how the combination of greed and amorality will lead to an unhappy ending (in Gecko's case, a very long jail term per Wall Street 2).  Yet the movie had a very surprising and opposite result: legions of future wall streeters saw that movie and decided that they, too, wanted to be masters of the universe and become fabulously rich from finance.  That we are face with a large financial crisis now as a result of those Wall Streeter's greed and recklessness can only stand as a sad testimony to the inadvertent effects of the 1980s movie.

Comes now the movie "The Social Network", and the parallels between it and the movie Wall Street are striking.  We have a young man who appears willing to act amorally to achieve his goals.  We have an older mentor who introduces him to the ways of the world.  We have people whose lives and fortunes are severely affected by the double dealing of the movie's protagonist.  And we have the requisite acquisition of money, fame, and women.  Only the story stops now, at the upswing of the arc, and besides paying a few people off, the protagonist has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Which leads me to my question, is "The Social Network" the new "Wall Street"? Will legions of young folks decide the way to fame, fortune (and, it seems, the beds of college coeds) be through technology start-ups?

I hope so.  Because the baby Wall Streeters learned that they could be rich by moving other people's money around and taking a bit off the top, baby The Social Networkers will learn that they can be rich by creating a product that meets a real need in the marketplace.

But I also doubt so.  Because working on Wall Street is tough, competitive, but it's also a corporate job.  The risk you take is only that you won't progress as far or as fast as you'd like. The path Zuckerberg and Facebook took was an all-in bet, and, oddly enough, the "Wall Street" offspring are very risk adverse when it comes to their own fortunes...