THe Social Network

In the movie “The Social Network” the filmmaker showed us a whole new aspect of communication. The movie loosely based on the creation of Facebook shows us the creation of an online social network that allows people from all walks of life to communicate openly about their own daily lives.

The movie begins with a young Harvard student going through the rigor of higher education with social dilemmas common to other students. One of the most prominent among Mark Zuckerbergs social bunders is his inability to communicate with regular students. Zuckerberg was incredibly gifted in the area of computer science and thus was not a communicator.

Among the first scenes Mark is seen talking to a young lady he is involved with and they have a conversational volley that shows his inability to communicate. Ironically the basis of the website Facebook is communication social between friends and strangers. Throughout the movie we are shown how Mark is not a great communicator interpersonally but he is able to communicate his own thoughts precisely and interpret others thoughts as to apply them to his own understanding.

The movie goes on to show Mark drunk and blogging about his experience with the young lady and in it he created a website that compared women on his campus. The site gained incredible popularity gaining over 22,000 hits in an evening. This I think was due to the public interest in communicating thoughts, as a media consumer we love to express our feelings about a subject especially if we can do it anonymously an as was the case with Zuckerbergs blog fueled site.

Moving forward the movie show us the exchange between two brothers that had an idea about a social networking site that was proprietary to Harvard. In this exchange the movie depicts Mark agreeing to help the brothers make their site. Although he agreed in the movie he does not complete their project and they become upset and claim he stole their idea.

Mark did not finish working with them and in turn launched an idea of his own, Facebook. Facebook was built on the premise that people wanted to know each other learn about each other and then ultimately communicate with each other. When building the site Zuckerberg came up with many ingenious ideas such as relationship statuses and picture tagging that let people interact even more.

Facebook interaction also started to propagate another form of language as well; web vernacular and Internet jargon became a common use in everyday communication. People started to say “Facebook Me” as a phrase meaning look my profile up on facebook or “friend me” which means essentially the same. These changes in verb usage have cause people to understand a whole new language that can even be labeled as a pidgin: a created language between a group of people.
The creation of facebook enabled us to look at groups on a large scale and analyze the way they interact and share information with each other. This understanding then became and incredible marketing tool for companies looking to reach the masses.

Socially Facebook can be said as one of the most important communicative tools of the 21st century, its capabilities reach to every country with Internet of any kind and it reaches some 500 million users. This market has a potential of far fewer websites of its kind. Imagine a group of high school graduate that keep in touch for 10 years after they leave their high schools only to come back together and start a new company with their skills or even simply to reconnect in a 10 year reunion online?
There are also the business communication aspects that can allow a group to chat or share a event via facebook! These different ideas and usages could only be dreamed about 5 years ago.

Talcott Parsons theorized about systems of action and stated that interaction was at the core of these systems. This meant that actors in any given situation will act based on their own cultural ideas and norms but the interaction with other people will also influence decisions. If we pply his theory to Facebook as a whole we can study the way friends on facebook view their friends profiles and view advertisements news stories etc.. via their friends profiles.

The movie shows us more of the history of facebook and a few people suing Mark but overall facebook remains a formidable source of communication among young adults. I am interested to see the future of Facebook, because so many people are drawn into its network and connectivity.

There are growing ideas and applications for facebook that have yet to be explored but in the near future I am confident it will remain a powerful communication tool.