The Social Network and a Reflection of the Past
An end of term review
This was my first time watching The Social Network movie and it’s a movie that brings up a lot of interesting points. I was never really interested in the drama of how Facebook started, but now I feel put off by the organization itself. I remember my first experience with Facebook; it was when I got accepted to IIT and found that that you could connect with your incoming class through this social media site. This was the first social networking site I joined and I was excited to participate. What I really like about the site was what the movie really touched on, the exclusivity of the website. In a way I felt safe, even though I knew I was sharing my information online with strangers I felt it was safe because only college students with a university email could join the site. I think chapter one really outlines the same issues that the founders of Facebook identified. Facebook was born during a time when it was starting to become commonplace for people to interact in online social spaces. Not only was this a new frontier for companies to conquer but for people to make their own claim in these social spaces. Ch 1 states that the communication within daily life and in business were becoming ineffective and new principles had to be defined that would compliment the global nature of our lives. It was this that made it possible for people to participate in an organization like Facebook. I think social spaces are really a unique example because we can identify this organization to have two types of members, there are those who work for the organization and help facilitate the goal of the organization and then those members that benefit from the services this organization provides; without either of these groups, the organization would not function. Reading my notes from chapter 1 also made me realize that Facebook is a good example of multicultural management because the organization itself has to lend itself to respond to the cultural styles and values of it’s members and adapt the leadership style in a way that responds to whoever is on the other side of the screen.
Another thing I noticed in the film was the stark differences in communication from the founders of Facebook and the communication between the Winklevoss twins and their partner Divya. I really liked how the Winklevoss twins and Divya interacted together through the development of their idea ConnectU and their communication styles when they found out that Mark had turned on them. In the movie, this team really listened to each other and respected the opinions they each had. I was really impressed with how no one in this team turned against each other or looked to further their own agenda. When Cameron (I think) insisted on not going after the founders of Facebook themselves and instead encourage his partners to behave like gentlemen, the other two, although they disagreed with the method agreed in the end to be on the same page. This team stood together throughout the ordeal of losing their potential company and success. The founders of Facebook however, were in constant disconnect. I mean this specifically with Mark, throughout the movie there were several examples of how he undermined Eduardo’s partnership, by not including him in any of the decisions that he made for example when he invested in more servers, when he needed to move to Silicon Valley, when he included Sean Parker as a member of the group even though he knew that Eduardo disapproved. It was this disconnect that I believe made Mark so paranoid and Eduardo feel like he was being edged out of the company.
Mark Zuckerberg is mirroring how society communicates in real life and creating a platform for people to do the same online. I think Facebook really shifted the way people communicated online from the idea that people should want anonymity online to create a culture where people are willingly giving up personal information in the attempt to connect to others. I think appeal of this type of network is that you either connect further with people you already know or reconnect with those you haven’t seen in years in a way that allows you share your life and view the life of others without going out of your way.
Blog Audit:
In reviewing my blog posts this semester I notice that throughout the semester i made comparisons on the topics we studied to various films and shows that I’ve watched. I thought it was fascinating to watch so many examples play out in shows that I already watch. However, I thought it was more interesting that I didn’t really see them as examples of communication either as part of how organizations work or how people communicate in general until we started analyzing these theories in the chapters assigned. I really enjoyed using media as a source of live examples because I’ve always believed that television reflects how our society behaves.
I found the format of this class really refreshing and at first the idea of blogging our way through class a bit unnerving especially as our opinions would be public to the internet. I am always wary about what I share online not only because I like to keep my life somewhat offline but because I have issues with how interactions on online social spaces tend to pan out. Online social spaces like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram as well as interactions “online” were built on the premise that through cyberspace we could create our own persona, allowing people to see what we wanted them to see and to connect with people whom we have interests in common. Now it’s not so much about anonymity online but extending ourselves into cyberspace. One of the things that really interests me about how people communicate in cyberspace is analyzing how much of ourselves we put online without much thought as to what we are giving up and who we are giving this up to. We have stopped being participants in these social spaces and have become a part of the system, far from just being actors in these spaces we fuel the algorithms that in turn fuel cyberspace. At first writing my blog posts was really difficult because I didn’t know how to share my thoughts or how careful I had to be in writing these posts. I was surprised to see in looking at my past posts how easy it has been to participate in this class, not only in sharing my thoughts during class for the week’s assignment but in commenting on other posts.
I think I can pinpoint when I really started enjoying blogging for this class, it was around week 9 where I personally felt that I put much more of my personality and I became really excited to share my thoughts. It became more than completing the assignment, when thinking about what I wanted to share for that particular week, I started thinking about what theme I noticed and what I could further relate the week’s topic to. I started adding more visuals to help those reading my posts understand both visually and with the text what ideas I was trying to convey. It was also around that time that I noticed that my comments were longer and more thorough. In reading other comments, I wanted not only to agree or disagree but give the person my own thoughts about the topic they were addressing. I think what I enjoyed the most about this class was learning about the history of how organizations interact and communicate and how those ideas have changed. I don’t think I really saw the big picture of how these shifts in communication for people and organizations really follow the way the history of the world has unraveled.
One of my favorite topics was discussing teams and groups and I would like to further analyze how teams and groups interact. Another topic that I feel really passionate about that I’ve been thinking a lot about how organizations interact or better yet react to the situation of firing someone. I liked the film Up in the Air and how Ryan (George Clooney’s) sees the work that he does and how he interacts with people as a real art. I’m interested in learning more about the different theories and strategies that organizations use to downsize their staff or fire someone and how the interaction between the organization and the almost-former-member of that organization interact. I think it’s important to analyze these type of interactions because they give other members of that organization an idea of the leadership style and the values of that organization. I saw a great example of “managing someone out” in the show Girls. In the show, one of the main characters Shoshana is living in Japan as part of a marketing team and one day out of the blue Shoshana gets a phone call from her supervisor and she gets fired. This interaction was so confusing for Shoshana but so interesting to watch because this company seems to want to embody a bubbly and non confrontational attitude that even when firing someone they don’t want the employee to feel like they are being rejected so they offer to fly her back in business class. I would like to analyze this further to see what other examples are out there.
