Image Management and the Development of Facebook

The process of image management was vital in the developmental stage of facebook as depicted in the 2010 film, The Social Network.

Mark Zuckerberg’s pursuit of maintaining his fellowship face was illustrated in the first scene in the film. Romantic rejection by the character “Erica” was the catalyst to him coding an online “hot or not” website where users could rate female students. Zuckerberg took immense pride in himself as he used his immense computer skills to infiltrate unprotected residential housing websites and gather female students’ bios and photos to develop this “hot or not” website. He purposely live blogged his actions as he was setting up the website which only took one night (and included a humiliating verbal assault toward Erica). Despite its degrading intentions, the popularity of the site counterbalanced Zuckerberg’s loss of fellowship face he received from the earlier romantic rejection.

In the same earlier scene when Zuckerberg is rejected by Erica, they discuss Harvard’s Final Clubs, the elite social clubs that Zuckerberg tremendously wanted to be invited to join. He remarked to her, “that’s how you distinguish yourself.” Joining a club would serve as a major component to his face needs.

Complicating the aspect of Zuckerberg’s face needs was the fact he wasn’t initially asked to join a Final Club and watched his best friend Eduardo Saverin be asked to join and go through the pledge process. In fact, Zuckerberg was content in his belief Saverin, even with financial accomplishments, wouldn’t be invited to join a Final Club. When learning of Saverin’s acceptance, Zuckerberg interpreted it as a face-threatening act. Zuckerberg was already notorious on campus from his website and believed he would be asked to join a Final Club.

In a classroom scene, two instances of Zuckerberg’s face needs are depicted. During the lecture of this Operations Systems class, which is an intensive high-level computer course, Zuckerberg received an anonymous note. It just read "Asshole", and he looked over to see a few female classmates scowling toward him. He is upset and abruptly begins to exit the classroom, but not before the professor calls out his rudeness for interrupting the lecture. Zuckerberg doesn’t apologize for his behavior and instead answered a difficult question the professor had just asked about computer programming. The professor dismisses Zuckerberg’s disruption of the class and acknowledges the answer was correct. Zuckerberg’s face is once again counterbalanced, or at least temporarily. The sentiment expressed in the note was an accurate opinion of the larger attitude toward Zuckerberg from the female students at the school.

Zuckerberg recognized the power of saving face even when it wasn’t his own face to save. One of the motivating factors of the Winklevoss Twins to pursue their lawsuit was for them to maintain their competence face. The accomplished brothers, already collegiate athletes at the time they were depicted in the film, took Zuckerberg’s alleged appropriation of their connectU website as a personal offense. Zuckerberg knew that. In a scene off the testimony record, Zuckerberg is speaking to a lawyer and says about the brothers, “for the first time in their lives the world didn't work the way it was supposed to for them.”

These are a few examples that show the swift rise to facebook’s success can be attributed to the pursuit of image management. Though Zuckerberg had already been a computer network prodigy even before entering Harvard, his needs to maintain face, both with his own personal facework and with facebook.com’s image management, propelled him to build facebook into the worldwide accomplishment it became.