Social Network

Social Network

Introduction

The film tells the story of the creation of one of the most popular online social network - Facebook. Resounding success of this network of users around the world has forever changed the lives of students, fellow students at Harvard University who founded it in 2004 and for several years became the youngest multi-millionaires in the U.S. The movie is directed by David Fincher and released in 2010. The characters include: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Max Minghella, Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara, Dakota Johnson, Brenda Song, Josh Pence (Gilbert, 2009).

Synopsis

To avenge his girlfriend has just dumped, Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, created a site called misogynistic Facemash on which boys can judge the beauty of the girls on campus. With his friends, he will then embark on a project far more ambitious, those who are revolutionizing the world of the Internet: they will invent Facebook. A brilliant idea that will attract the greed and end friendships. The film follows the incredible story of the site was created in 2004 to the essential community and social network it is today.

In the first decade of the 2000s, social network sites (SNS) emerged as one of the dominant means for accessing information and communication online. This has led to simultaneous concerns about the quality of friendships on these sites, as well as the abundance of information stored and how it is accessed. Sociologists and social network analysts have shown that Facebook, as an exemplar SNS, leads to greater social capital and an expanded friend network, but it does so at the expense of privacy and the ability to do granular impression management online.

Relevancy

Mark Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash at Harvard in late 2003. In February 2004, it was rebranded as Facebook and was released to selected university communities. The early history of the site remains a contentious issue for Zuckerberg, as it is unclear how much the site was related to another project, the Harvard Connection. The Harvard Connection founders and Zuckerberg settled out of court. Nevertheless, the notoriety of Facebook's early years was the subject of a successful, semifictionalized Hollywood blockbuster, The Social Network.

Facebook was hardly the first social network site. Prior to Facebook, Six Degrees, MySpace, and Friendster all enjoyed substantial popularity. However, Facebook's simple aesthetic, perceived legitimacy, and capacity to scale led to very rapid growth, first among college campuses and then within the wider North American population. In September 2006, the site was available to anyone over 13 with a valid e-mail address.

The basic function of Facebook is to facilitate information sharing between individuals who have indicated that they are mutual friends. This information includes archival material, such as photos and blog posts, as well as real-time material (status updates and a chat window) and information about the future (such as events and birthdays). Because of the comprehensive functions available on this site, Facebook brands itself as a “social utility.” Nevertheless, scholars still tend to consider the site an example of a social ...