The Social Network Extra Credit

I went to see this movie about a month ago, but wanted to write about it now while I was in the midst of reading the Facebook Effect. For this blog entry I want to give a short summary of the plot, provide my own criticisms, and then finish with a comparison of the movie to the story that we are reading about in Kirkpatrick's book.


While attending Harvard University, young programmer Mark Zuckerberg, creates a website called 'FaceMash' that takes pictures of girls on campus and allows other students to compare their looks or 'hotness' to each other. The website creates such a stir that Zuckerberg instantly becomes well known and is sought after by a group of frat brothers attempting to make a Harvard exclusive social networking site. Zuckerberg agrees to do it, but then takes their core idea (which is that users must have a harvard.edu email address to use it) and applies to his own website that he called 'thefacebook'. Zuckerberg brings his roommate, Eduardo Saverin, into the project by having him supply the start-up capitol to get the site going, but then once the site escalates to a certain point, Saverin's shares are dropped well below 1%.

From here on out, the bulk of the movie takes places during the trial where Mark Zuckerberg is being sued by Eduardo Saverin as well as the frat brothers. As each person involved in the case makes their statements, and we see flashbacks of how actions unfolded.


The first thing worth noting is that this movie uses the real names of most people involved and is more or less telling a story of events that actually happened. This is not new to movies, but I thought that it was pretty neat they did it this way instead of making a movie about some arbitrary social network and having the plot loosely based on Facebook's story. It felt more real to me and at the same time gave audiences a pretty decent crash course on how Facebook came to be so popular (although its almost guaranteed that some aspects of the movie were inflated for entertainment purposes). The best part of the movie, for me, was the dialog. It was consistently witty and creative while paced appropriately such that there were hardly any moments that allowed for an absence of attention. They did this and still managed to keep the plot easy to follow which is impressive considering the movie clocks in at just about 2 hours. While not be a huge fan of the actors involved in the movie (i.e. Justin Timberlake and the Fake Michael Cera kid) I thought they a good job creating a dramatic interpretation of this real life story.


After reading more than half of the Facebook Effect and watching this movie, it was nice to see the story from two seperate angles. Kirkpatrick really made you feel like Zuckerberg was a revolutionary while The Social Network gave off this vibe that he was a kind of a self-centered backstabber. This put me in good spirits to know that the reality of the situation probably fell somewhere in the middle. It's so difficult sometimes to determine when the people that wrote these stories are trying to give you facts or entertain you, but I suppose thats the magic of the media.