‘Network’ chronicles Facebook’s growing pains
Online networks weren’t a new idea when Mark Zuckerberg thought
up Facebook as an undergraduate at Harvard. But Zuckerberg, for
better or worse, changed the face of social networking forever.
The first time I got a friends request, Facebook didn’t exist. I
got my request from a friend who had signed up for an account on
the beta version of Friendster. It was a new concept
– a site where people could create a profile and connect with
their friends, coworkers or other people they knew. On Friendster,
I had maybe a dozen friends, mostly my computer geek friends from
high school because they were the only ones who had heard of
it.
‘Network’ chronicles Facebook’s growing pains
Online networks weren’t a new idea when Mark Zuckerberg thought up Facebook as an undergraduate at Harvard. But Zuckerberg, for better or worse, changed the face of social networking forever.
The first time I got a friends request, Facebook didn’t exist. I got my request from a friend who had signed up for an account on the beta version of Friendster. It was a new concept – a site where people could create a profile and connect with their friends, coworkers or other people they knew. On Friendster, I had maybe a dozen friends, mostly my computer geek friends from high school because they were the only ones who had heard of it.
Then everyone migrated from Friendster to MySpace, including a lot of my computer geek friends. But on MySpace there were other people, too. I had about two dozen friends, including some pals from college and an L. A. Times columnist who signed up for an account just to write a column about how kids would leave the site if their parents started using it.
He was right. Soon enough everyone had moved on to Facebook. But Facebook was different than the other sites. It made it easier to find people and share content. It fundamentally changed what it meant to social network. Sure, a lot of what it offers is a big time suck – Farmville, Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars – and maybe there is something a little bit creepy about people being able to check out photos of you (though you can set privacy levels so only friends can see them.) And a lot of times people I know post way more than I want to know.
But overall, I like that I can chat with a guy I met in Ireland when I was 20 or a friend from elementary school who lives in another state now. I like that I can share pictures from a weekend party with my friends and say hi with a post on their walls or congratulate them on their newborn. With Facebook, I saw my friend’s baby’s first steps, thanks to an online video.
Zuckerberg was really onto something when he came up with the idea for Facebook. Of course, one of the main points of the movie “The Social Network” is the contention that Zuckerberg did not come up with the idea on his own. The screenplay by Aaron Sorkin is based on a book by Ben Mezrich, “The Accidental Billionaires.” The movie runs two parallel timelines as it goes back and forth between Zuckerberg’s depositions in two lawsuits to his time at Harvard, when he first started working on Facebook.
In the movie, Zuckerberg’s creation was not about making a lot of money so much as creating an exclusive club where he could be part of the in crowd. Jesse Eisenberg (of ‘Zombieland’), as always, plays a perfect geek. As Zuckerberg, he talks without thinking about his words, often balancing half a dozen ideas at once and leaving his conversation partner struggling to follow the strands of his thoughts. He comes off as having Asperger’s, a mild form on the autism spectrum that makes people miss nonverbal cues so that they often act socially awkward.
The movie opens with him having a drink with his girlfriend Erica (played by Rooney Mara, who stars in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”) She’s a Boston University student and early on Zuckerberg, who wants to get into an exclusive club at Harvard, offends Erica. She breaks up with him, prompting him to storm back to his dorm to do some angry, drunken blogging and coding. He writes means things about her on his LiveJournal blog. As the night goes on, he decides to use his coding and hacking skills to set up a site that allows visitors to choose the more attractive of two female photos.
The prank lands him on academic probation, but brings him to the attention of two upperclassmen. Cameron (Armie Hammer) and Tyler (Josh Pence) Winklevoss approach Zuckerberg about their idea to create an exclusive dating site for Harvard students. They and their business partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) have been trying to get the site off the ground, but they keep losing their programmers. Zuckerberg agrees to help them. The key to the site is that to sign up for an account, users will have to have a Harvard.edu e-mail address.
But instead of getting to work on their project, he gets his best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) to lend him $1,000 to start work on another project he calls The Facebook. The idea is similar to a college Facebook, a publication that includes a photo and a little bit of information about incoming freshman on college campuses. Zuckerberg wants to allow users to include a basic profile and photos. But he also wants it to be exclusive so that people can only join if they are from Harvard.
The movie continues to follow Facebook through its early expansion, and chronicles Zuckerberg’s eventual falling out with Eduardo, which leads to his second lawsuit. Along the way, Zuckerberg meets Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster. Timberlake’s Parker is far from a geek and, at least in the movie, he is the one who pushes Zuckerberg to expand Facebook beyond campuses in the Boston area. The acting is good and the story is interesting, but it is probably not fast-paced enough for the 20-somethings and teens who spend the most time on Facebook. It is, however, a movie that is worth a watch for those with a longer attention span.
