The Social Network and Bejamin Franklin Ideas

1630 Words4 Pages

As we referred in the lecture, Hollywood is a reflection of Franklinean ideas itself. Therefore, many of Hollywood movies contain the ideas of Franklin about self-help, self-educate, and so on. However, one of the most important things is about how Hollywood want the world to identify America and its people through these films. In this essay, I focus on “The Social Network”, the film about the rise of Facebook and its chairman Mark Zuckeberg. The essay gives the readers the ideas of how Hollywood identify Facebook and its founders. All of these ideas also show the relationship between the film with Franklin’s view on identification and his thirteen virtues.
Firstly, we should consider about the context of the film. The film is about the rise of Facebook, and it can be considered as the documentary of the largest social network worldwide. However, the film is not showed in the way the documentary is supposed to be. It focuses on the two lawsuits. The first one is between Mark and Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook. The second one is about the intellectual theif, with Mark is accused by Winklevoss brothers. Because of these lawsuits, Mark, Eduardo, and Winklevoss brothers have to tell the whole story about Facebook from the beginning. As a result, Hollywood wants to portrait Facebook is a very complicated case, which Mark had to defense himself and his company against his foes, and even his best friend.
This is the way of identification which was mastered by Franklin in the past. The content is not as important as the way and the perspective you choose to represent the story. Therefore, by choosing the lawsuits to tell the story, Hollywood tried to identify business world as an extremely harsh world where best friends can...

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...To conclude, the essay gives you the ideas about how Hollywood use their medium to identify a real character and to influence the public. They are also strongly related to Benjamin Franklin in term of expressing his idea to the world. “The Social Network” is a very interesting product of Hollywood, which contain not only the historic data about the founding of Facebook but also to represent the idea of Franklin which unintentionally influences the most important figures of modern social media, Mark Zuckeberg and co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Moreover, it also shows us how the Internet and its community changes the way of identifying with the change of the supporting tools.

Works Cited

Case, A. (2011). We are all cyborgs now. TED Talks. 2011. Available at :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1KJAXM3xYA
Fincher, D. (2010). The social network. Sony Pictures. 2010. Film.

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