The Social Network Blog Post
By: Jerica Gomez, Alejandra Delgado, and Chris Hinojosa
The Late president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said “We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics”. These words still ring true in today’s money-centric society. Everything is cutthroat and follows a very dog-eat-dog sentiment.
Especially apparently in the tech industry, it seems like you need to have the biggest, most innovative before anyone else in order to be successful. If you aren’t first you’re simply swept under the rug by a competitor that feels no remorse. It is in this kind of setting that we find the brainstorming and ultimate creation of Facebook, arguably the biggest force in social media and networking.
Saying that the founding and rise of Facebook was a little controversial is a major understatement. It seems like a countless number of people had to get “thrown under the bus” in order to Mark Zuckerberg to get rich and famous. Both business and social ethics seem to fall by the wayside, in some cases ruining the lives of multiple people in the process.
Venture capitalism and who had the role in the creation of Facebook might be a different answer depending on who you are asking and it's a bit controversial. Eduardo Saverin was considered the initial investor with the start start up money to start thefacebook, he handled all the business aspects of the the network while Mark Zuckerberg created it. The business deal as the venture capitalist was an agreement that he would get 30% of the company for the money put up, while Mark would receive 70%.
Eduardo Saverin was Mark's best friend at the time and he was liked to give people at Harvard the impression that he was rich wealth, he was very eager to be involved in a fraternity. He was very intelligent and great at math and was an asset to Mark's creations and was the business face of the original thefacebook network.
The Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler were two very wealthy men of a fraternity that came from a high society who were in the midst of creating their own social network and gave Zukerberg the initial layout for his soon to be million dollar company. They approached Mark after he created his very first site that crashed the network FaceMash they were intrigued by his network and approached him with the idea of the Harvard connection, where they gave him all the means to create their network while he lead them to believe that he was doing so, and continued to give them the run around while he created his own network using the ground work of their idea.
Sean Parker became Mark Zuckerberg's business partner and was the founder of the music app Napster. He became intrigued when facebook gained a lot of popularity but was very money driven. Parker and Zuckerberg con Eduardo to give up almost all his shares within the company for personal gain. He was a very cocky, arrogant and manipulative man.
Zuckerberg's attitude towards exclusivity of networks, his initial target was Harvard, then it expanded to other prestigious ivy league colleges as it gained popularity. The initial idea was something fun and hip. The exclusivity came into play when you had to know who the people were to get passed the site. Requiring a university email to access the network. The users had the ability to invite or deny people and were able to use there own photos.
Looking at the gender roles and interactions, it is very simple to see what little regard the men had for women. The entire event that got the ball rolling for the idea of Facebook was finding a way to seek revenge on Erica Albright after she dumps Mark Zuckerberg for insulting her education and claiming assuming that the only reason they were even able to go on their date at the bar was because she had slept with the ‘door guy’ who was a close friend of hers. It is very obvious how she easily found this offensive.
He looks to lash out and take his frustration out on the female students from nine Harvard houses after Erica claims that women will not like him not because he is a nerd, but because he is an asshole. [On the contrary, at the end of the movie, a law intern tells him that he is not an asshole, he just tries to be, which seems to make him thoughtful as he goes to friend Erica Albright on Facebook].
This website was called FaceMash, where two students were compared side-by-side and users chose which was ‘hotter’. It is extremely petty. Once Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss twins hear of what Mark Zuckerberg did with FaceMash that got 22,000 hits in two hours and shut down Harvard’s network. They go to confront him to ask about him being a programmer for them, he asks if he had insulted their girlfriends. They are quick to answer that they do not know, should probably ask them, and brush the subject away implying that they do not care who was hurt by the website.
The only people that seem to care about such are the adults on the Administration Board, blatantly portrayed as killjoys, to put it simply. Throughout the rest of the movie as well, women are represented as simplistic, stupid, or objectified. Mark Zuckerberg's (for a time) best friend (and later co-founder of Facebook) Eduardo Saverin also consistently makes remarks on women (specifically on Asian women) that are purely sexual in nature. His hook-up that later becomes his girlfriend is also portrayed as a psychotic, possessive woman.
Once Mark moves to California, the women that live in the house spend their screen time getting stoned and used seemingly as entertainment. The shown relationships between the men and women are -in one word- unhealthy.
In conclusion, it's safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg was definitely at the right place and the right time when he began working on Facebook. Another important thing to note is that the film The Social Network wasn’t based on a completely thoroughly researched biography of the creation of Facebook. Rather, it was based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by author Ben Mezrich. The primary consultant for the book was apparently Eduardo Saverin, which very much could have made the material somewhat biased.
The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezricha
There are even conflicting accounts from most of the other founders of Facebook. Many who have stated that both the book and the film have some elements of truth, but were still very much exaggerated in order to make for better experiences for viewers. This makes sense because it's doubtful that the uneventful, more truthful version of the history of Facebook’s founding most likely wouldn’t garner as many accolades as a more dramatized version would have. Movie goers and society itself kind of craves narratives with grandiose displays of drama where the stakes are high and if one person isn’t a predator they instantly become the prey.
This is also unfortunate, because if the film does paint certain people in a bad light purposefully in order to make the story better than it in turn would be tarnishing those people’s names in the spirit of greed. More realistic representations of historical events should have a more meaningful impact on ticket sales. Only time will tell if this will ever happen.
