Friday, January 21, 2011
The Social Network
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mar 8:36
Facebook, The Social Network Site as of January 2011 has 600,000,000 million members. This movie illustrates how it grew from an experimental attempt to establish a network on the campus of Harvard University. It begins with an extended dialogue between Mark and his girlfriend worthy of David Mamet in its adroit complexity establishing his self-absorption, moral turpitude, and nerdiness. His exploits gain wider attention when his budding experiment crashes the Harvard Network. As the project expands to campuses across America and then the public at large and worldwide what started as a dorm room experiment becomes a multi-billion dollar enterprise and the people who were in at the basement level start making claims.
Two lawsuits ensue first involving the well-heeled jocks in a Harvard Fraternity who had first asked Zuckerberg to write code for a network they proposed. In contrast to Mark these were six-foot-five-inch athletes who intimidate by virtue of their size and their connections. The second was his friend who put up the cash that got him started. What value should be placed on capital investment versus intellectual property and what loyalty is placed on friendship. That an online network based on ‘friendship’ should be founded on the betrayal of real-life friends is ironic indeed.
Justin Timberlake appears as the charismatic Sean Parker founder of Napster whose prima donna appearances serve to influence certain of Zuckerberg’s key decisions. The two make an interesting contrast. The movie takes the form of an extended voir-dire with the parties sitting around a boardroom table while flashbacks serve to illustrate the points being made by legal counsel. To show the estrangement between the former friends the director uses the stage device of having Edwardo and Mark seated facing away from one another. In a revealing moment opposing counsel asks the bored looking Mark, ‘Do I have your attention? and he replies, ‘My oath requires that I answer honestly that you have only a tiny part of it’. When Wardo makes it out to California to see what his money is doing and finds a drug party in progress in the livingroom he approaches Mark and is told ‘he’s wired in’; he picks up the laptop and smashes it to the ground saying, ‘Now do I have your attention?’
Mark’s interest seems to be in software development and online social experiment; Wardo whose cash initially supplied the start-up capital is interested in the venture as a business that should supply a return on that capital and show a profit. Both are right but whereas Mark managed to ride the juggernaut the venture became to a $25-billion-dollar enterprise Wardo got left behind. Since the parties settled out of court and signed non-disclosure agreements we may never know how they settled. The question I’m left with is, ‘Do I really want to contribute to this enterprise?’
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# posted by garthmailman@gmail.com @ 11:06 am 
