I had more to say about the far better than average, sociologically mature Surrogates, but I needed some more time to really dig into that. The reason you've probably not read much about it all over the movie blogverse is that it cuts a bit closer to the bone than something like WALL-E or We Live in Public on the "slob glued to his chair and screen" thing. Surrogates directly confronts the addiction to little lit-up screens and avoiding real social contact in the world.
Surrogates is set in an alternate (but not so different) modern-day. The only sci-fi leap is the presence of lifelike, human androids being controllable by your thoughts from a chair in your home. 98% of the population uses them. You can be and look like anybody, regardless of your physical reality. It's like playing a massively multiplayer online game in the real world and being able to force a robot to go outside to run errands and do your chores. Everyone lives in a recliner wearing their bedclothes, sleepwalking through existence. In Surrogates, people who go outside physically leave their Surrogate at home are defamed as "meatbags". How dare they go outside!
In the lives we actually lead, social networking sites are very inaccurately named. If anything, they're anti-social, disingenuous buffers against real life. It's easier to call someone a racist fascist asshole with no real-world repercussions. People react violently when their addiction to their smartphones and laptops is questioned, like you're out of your mind. While conducting "conversations" with people, I regularly get active listening cues like "uh huh, yeah, I know, right?" from people I'm talking at, but whose eyes are glued to their little digital crack devices.
Isn't it reasonable to think it's nuts that I regularly see men balance their smartphones on urinal flushers so that they can be "connected" for the 30-90 seconds they stand there and piss? How many cases of hemorrhoids have been caused by people not leaving their digital lives at rest when they go to the bathroom? How many online writers are paying attention to the closing minutes of a movie when they're thinking about how to sum it up in 140 characters the instant that the credits roll?
I can pinpoint the check-out moment in Surrogates for many of the movie bloggerati: when it's found that a highly sexual female surrogate is found to be operated by a bald, overweight, middle-aged man. They react to that as some sort of affront against overweight, indoorsy guys like them, and what's worse, it infers that they're all total gays. Two things that insecure, straight male shut-ins hate is seeing something that could be construed as portraying them negatively or (the horror) homosexually.
I'm not saying that all of these guys are unshaven, unclean, passive-aggressive, and lonely people who avoid conflict at all costs. Plenty of them have lives, wives and/or girlfriends, and are independent thinkers. That being said, there's a remarkable flood of them that hide behind walls of anonymity or the abstract barrier of the internet, where they don't have to be accountable for the sometimes psychotic things that they say or write.
Many of them are also among the set who believe they're entitled to steal content, whether the ideas or writings of others, or actual movies and other things via torrent networks. When they're called out for theft, they accuse those who are in the right of being "whiners" or "mad at the world". When forced outside at festivals, they travel in packs to bolster their sense of physical and ethical security. None of them would stand up for themselves by "taking it outside", but will (emptily) threaten legal action or physical violence as a bully tactic along the lines of "I'm gonna call my mom!"
They leverage a group opinion of "so and so is an asshole" or "no one likes you" to insulate themselves against anyone critical of them. Everything becomes all about being best of pals with everyone so that you can take advantage of this Cool Guys Co-op, and not making any waves. Most of the writing that comes from these people resembles indirectly subsidized studio publicity with little to no critical voice or individuality.
That hive consciousness is very much what permeates the world that exists in Surrogates. We are a society of think-alike, superficial idiots with no emotional capacity for analytical thought. That world is a great deal harder to digest than the escapism of space-traveling to a distant world and having 10-foot-tall blue people sex with Zoe Saldana.
I should disclose that I've written this piece in my pajamas while sitting on my couch with the curtains drawn, occasionally posting to Twitter. I believe the "think-alike" sentence in the preceding paragraph could be read both ways.