Film Analysis of "The Social Network"

Do all best-friendships last a lifetime? Or can something incredibly unforgivable cause a friendship to plummet? In the film The Social Network, the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, runs into a few complications on his way to success. During college at Harvard in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg invents the idea of Facebook and brings it to life with the help of one of his closest friends, Eduardo Saverin. Meanwhile, as his incredible idea takes flight, a few other boys in the school claim their idea was stolen by Zuckerberg. By the end of the film, Zuckerberg was in the middle of two lawsuits, one of which being from his best friend. Throughout the film, communication changes played a big role in Mark and Eduardo’s relationship causing there friendship to slowly shift to enemies. Three big events in particular caused there friendship to go off the deep end, which include the interference of a new businessman named Sean Parker, Eduardo freezing his bank account to get Marks attention, and ending with Mark cutting Eduardo’s ownership of the company.

The first event that began the plummet of Mark and Eduardo’s friendship was the interference of Sean Parker. Sean Parker was the owner of a popular online music website called Napster. Mark and Eduardo arranged to meet with him to discuss advice on growing the company. Eduardo didn’t really like Sean very much since he disagreed with almost all of his ideas and agreed with all of Marks ideas. A few weeks after the meeting, Mark ending up moving to California during the summer, while Eduardo was stuck in New York doing an internship and trying to find more business connections for Facebook. In California, Mark had gotten really close with Sean. During Eduardo’s visit to California to discuss information about the company, Eduardo finds out Sean has been setting up a lot of business meetings for Facebook and was asked to join the company by Mark. After hearing this, Eduardo felt very betrayed since he was not informed about any of this information prior to his visit and since Sean was basically doing his job. Mark informed Eduardo that Sean had many more business connections then him and needed Sean in order to expand the company, which Eduardo found very insulting. This event can be related to low self-monitoring explained on page 69 of the Communication Matters textbook “People on the low end express whatever they are thinking or feeling without paying attention to the impression they're creating.” In this situation, when Mark and Eduardo are arguing, Mark doesn’t seem to care about the insults coming out of his mouth and how it would affect Eduardo’s feelings. From these actions, it also can be seen that Mark also doesn’t care about how Eduardo may now look at him as a person. This was just one out of three of the main events that caused Mark and Eduardo’s friendship to take a negative turn.

The next event that weakened Mark and Eduardo’s friendship even further was when Eduardo had decided to freeze his bank account. After Sean Parker had taken over Eduardo’s role in the company, Mark began ignoring Eduardo and not informing him about any updates involving the company. Eduardo thought the only way to get Mark’s attention would be to freeze his bank account, which would result in the Facebook server crashing since Eduardo’s money was what was running the Facebook servers. Once Mark found out about this, him and Eduardo gotten into a huge argument. Mark argued that if the Facebook servers were to the crash, the company could be at a big risk of losing viewers. Eduardo replied with an explanation of how he needed to get Mark’s attention somehow. This event can be related to the Johari Window explained on page 67 of the Communication Matters textbook “In 1955, U.S. psychologists Joesph Luft and Harry Ingham created the Johari window, a visual representation of the self as composed of four separate parts….the open area consists of characteristics that are known both to the self and to others.” The open area of the Johari window describes how Eduardo and Mark both knew Eduardo’s behavior was very selfish and intentional. Eduardo knew exactly what he was doing when he decided to freeze his bank account, he knew he was being very selfish. It was obvious that Mark also knew Eduardo’s decision was very selfish and intentional. This was just event two out of three of the main events that caused Mark and Eduardo’s friendship to plummet.

Lastly, the final event that not only weakened, but ended Mark and Eduardo’s friendship throwing it off the deep end was Mark cutting Eduardo’s ownership of the company without telling him. After Sean Parker had joined the company crew and Eduardo frustrated Mark with his shenanigans of freezing his bank account putting the company in jeopardy, Mark thought it was time to get rid of Eduardo for good by cutting his share of the company from 30% to 0.03% of ownership. When Eduardo found out about this during a meeting, he became so furious he barged out of the office room, stormed up to Mark and they began arguing. The argument ended after Sean called security and forced Eduardo to leave the building. This last event can be related to the fundamental attribution error explained on page 66 of the Communication Matters textbook “…the fundamental attribution error, in which we attribute other people’s behaviors to internal rather than external causes.” The fundamental attribution error can be applied to this situation because Eduardo did not think of the external causes that could have caused Mark to decide to cut his ownership of the company, he was only thinking of the internal causes.

In conclusion, communication changes played a big role in Mark and Eduardo’s relationship causing there friendship to slowly shift to enemies. The three main events that weakened and ended Mark and Eduardo’s relationship was the interference of Sean Parker taking over Eduardo’s role in the company, Eduardo freezing his bank account in order to get Mark’s attention, and Mark cutting Eduardo’s ownership in the company without telling him. Starting with a small miscommunication and ending with not communicating at all crumbled Mark and Eduardo’s friendship to dust.