This week for class we looked at The Social Network and Essena O’Neill’s thoughts on Instagram and social media. In the film The Social Network, we get to see how Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook got to be one of the largest platforms online. Next I looked at why Essena O’Neill took down her Instagram page.
The Social Network which shows us Zuckerberg’s story and how he got to where he was with Facebook. It came out in 2010 starring Justin Timberlake, Jessie Eisenberg, and Andrew Garfield. After watching I did more research because of how enjoyable it was watching I found that this film also won three Academy Awards, including Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. The film starts with Mark Zuckerberg attending Harvard University where he was heartbroken and decides to create a website named Face-mash that allowed him to hack into college databases and get pictures of the female students and allowed people to visit the site and rate their attractiveness. When he is discovered he receives 6 months of academic probation, which I thought to be very forgiving because in today’s society you would be kicked out of school for doing something like that. On the other hand if Zuckerberg was expelled there is a large possibility that we would not have Facebook today. After the site came to an end Zuckerberg and 3 other people worked together with the idea of social media in mind where Harvard students could go there with the goal of making new relationships as well as dating among them. Then this idea was got bigger to where it would be all the Ivy League Schools. With one thousand dollars Zuckerberg built the website, making Narendra and the Winklevoss twins very upset and thinking Zuckerberg kept them in the dark and stealing their idea. They even went to the President at Harvard complaining, but Zuckerberg did not receive any punishment from the school, on top of that Saverin becomes furious when his shares of Facebook took a massive drop from 34% to .003%, but still having ownership of the other parties involved. At the end Zuckerberg is being accused of stealing the idea of Facebook. I think that this film helps us to know who exactly Mark Zuckerberg, which also helped me understand some of his actions after 2010. It was very eye opening, but interesting at the same time showing the process of how the large social media platform of Facebook came to be.
A famous Australian teenager on Instagram, Essena O’Neill was finally fed up with the social media platform and took down her account and page. She hated the fact that you needed to be perfect in every way to get attention and followers. Her decision had many supporting her to create her own website where there will be no comments and likes, meaning it will just be real people and their posts with no negative messages. I think that this website does have a lot of potential because others are also done with receiving hate messages and other comments.
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
If I remember correctly I believe Instagram experiment with getting rid of likes in the sense that they weren’t counted and displayed for users to see but you could still like a post. I think the only person who was able to see who like the post was the person who posted the picture but then to find out the total number of people they would of had to just count every single person. This only lasted for a couple of weeks and then Instagram went right back to the way it was before. It was interesting to see how Facebook started and all the problems that came up with it and it was interesting that the founder of Napster which we just talked about a week or so ago was also involved. I agree with you that this really does shed some light on how Mark has handled everything to present day.
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