Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell
David Fincher (director), Aaron Sorkin (writer), The Social Network (2010)
The film The Social Network (2010) is directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin who adapted the book by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (2009). It tells the story of the birth of Facebook and therefore the birth of social media as mass media, which changed modern life. This transformation emerged almost by accident with some precociously intelligent nerdy college students at Harvard University who were initially entertaining each other and fellow students until they realised that what they created was an instant hit with unlimited money-making potential. The birth of Facebook also represents an important stage in the dot-com revolution that saw talented young computer programmers create online business ideas that founded their own business empires and attracted enormous share market interest and investment.
The young Mark Zuckerberg, the main character in the film, is presented as by far the principal originator of Facebook and as a genius in terms of computer programming. He quickly emerges as the main digital creator, indispensable computer programmer, and most important potential money generator. While others around him are impressive, no one else is in Mark Zuckerberg’s league.
In this context, the film also looks at how money changes people. Individuals who were friends, college roommates and cordial associates become power-hungry, ruthless, envious, selfish, greedy, desperate, resentful, parasitic, duplicitous or vengeful. As friendships and other cordial associations ended to be replaced by bitter legal battles, the film particularly laments the decline of the friendship between the nerdy and abrasive Mark Zuckerberg and the nerdy and friendly Eduardo Saverin, a friendship that had seemed mutually advantageous until Zuckerberg’s creative computer-programming talent marginalised Savarin’s contribution and made him seem like a hanger-on as far as Zuckerberg is concerned. The film conveys how Eduardo Savarin is gradually marginalised and then dramatically edged out of the company and the friendship.
Other friends and associates meet a similar fate. The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, came up with the original idea for a Harvard social networking site, and they, along with their friend and minor contributor Divya Narendra, felt cheated by Zuckerberg’s strong sense that he did not need these other people to create his network. Consequently, Zuckerberg excluded them during the development of Facebook and after its launch.
Later, Zuckerberg’s ruthlessness was also meted out to Sean Parker, the inventor of the revolutionary music file-sharing site Napster, a brash, confident and cool young man whom Zuckerberg originally liked and admired and wanted to befriend. But eventually Sean Parker also became a casualty of the duplicitous infighting. Sean Parker had helped push Eduardo Saverin out of Facebook before he found himself betrayed and marginalised. Notably, the film features the emotional pain and panic of the secondary characters around Zuckerberg as they become marginalised and left behind as a computing superstar rises in stature, grandeur and power.
The film features two legal hearings arising from lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg by those who felt cheated by him: one case filed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss along with Divya Narendra, and the other filed by Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg ended up having pay out to the aggrieved parties, sums amounting to multi-millions of dollars. But, by then, he was so wealthy he could easily handle these losses. In addition, he is so precociously intelligent and arrogant that he treats the high-powered lawyers arrayed against him with contempt. At the end of the film, it is revealed that his lawyers calculated that it was in their client’s best interest to contest these cases in hearings rather than in a court because they believed that Zuckerberg was so obnoxious he would alienate a jury and suffer a greater financial loss in the pay out as a consequence.
Notably, the film can be seen as telling the story of the emergence of one of the most important young men of the twenty-first century, Mark Zuckerberg. In this sense, the film is a character study that explores the behaviour and underlying motivations of a young man who became the world’s youngest billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg is a computer programming genius who also happens to be arrogant, obnoxious, tactless, and abrasive, and who therefore makes few friends. In regard to Zuckerberg’s motivations to create Facebook, the filmmakers presented him as a young man who never got over losing his first girlfriend, Erica Albright, and who, after that, was secretly trying to impress her and win her back. Creating Facebook was part of his attempt to impress her. They also presented Zuckerberg as a nerd who was motivated by the desire to be perceived as cool, or accepted by cool people, and he created Facebook, in part, to achieve this. The filmmakers also conveyed that Zuckerberg was arrogantly motivated to prove to the world that he was even smarter than all the other smart people, including, for example, others at Harvard who also got perfect SAT (university entrance) scores. He wanted to be perceived as the smartest of all. Creating Facebook helped him demonstrate this.
Due to his extremely high rational and mathematical intelligence, Zuckerberg sees himself as so much better than everyone else. However, despite these formidable attributes, he is severely lacking in other forms of intelligence, like self-knowledge and the ability to understand those around him. He is profoundly lacking in empathy and tact, and he seems to have a limited emotional range or ability to express emotions, or to show affection. He does not exhibit strong emotions at times of triumph or disappointment, and when he does show some semblance of compassion, it does not result in mercy. Zuckerberg can be seen as an impressive yet troubling individual who made a major contribution to global culture.
Student resources by Dr Mark Lopez
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The purpose of the concise notes of Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell is to provide much needed help to students seeking to unlock the meaning of the texts with which they have to deal. (More elaborate notes are provided in lessons as part of my private tutoring business.)
Subject: The Social Network meaning, The Social Network themes, The Social Network analysis, The Social Network notes