Hacking the Code: Decoding Power, Gender, and Vision in The Social Network

 

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ASSIGNMENT 1

In our world today new technology, social media and other new things are taking over the way we run our lives, making our lives easier or some might say “harder”, but I mean it’s all about perspective, we often enjoy these apps that these creators and inventors come up with but do we know the background story and struggle they face just to come up with an app that is supposed to take the whole world by storm? The movie “The Social Network” is a biography talks about how the founder Facebook Mark Zuckerberg took over the world from his dorm room with a small laptop and an idea, the movie also displays the struggles that he went through and the tough decisions he had to make to actualize his vision of the app Facebook and in this review of the film I will be using Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model and possible readings of the encoded meanings about vision, power, gender and class within the tech culture through its narrative structure, editing and mise-en-scene, this is also exploring how different audiences night interpret this film’s message in dominant, negotiated or oppositional.

David Fincher, the director of the film, portrays Mark Zuckerberg as someone who has a vast mind and sees things in a lens that can’t be understood by the common man because most people might question the decisions he made in the film but there is a meaning behind every decision and every action he took, while some people think that the writer might have painted Zuckerberg as a visionary with an awful personality I think that there was a motive and a play behind everything that happened from when he brought Sean Parker on board to when he removed his best friend from the Facebook. The film’s editing, narrative structure, and mise-en-scene were used to encode ideas about three things: the vision, power, gender, and class in the tech culture.

The film portrays Mark Zuckerberg’s vision as world changing idea, but Fincher questions the way he went about it, his ethics and motivations behind his ideas, Zuckerberg’s first idea of an app called Facemash was propelled by his break up with his girlfriend Erica and in the scene there was fast paced editing during the coding sequences and intense brainstorming sessions, this app portrayed his potential disregard for others the mise-en-scene of this dorm coding session where he brings his visions to life is dimly lit, chaotic and fueled by beers and energy drinks, this shows how relentless Zuckerberg is and how restless he is unless he brings his visions to life.

Fincher also portrays that power can bring a man down and make a man do things that are out of the ordinary, he describes this in the series of betrayals, particularly that of his closest friend Eduardo Saverin, Fincher reminds us by using the narrative structure framed by legal depositions, the power struggles and legal battles that the rise of Facebook faced from the lawsuit by the twins and their friend accusing him of stealing their idea meanwhile he just took it and made it better this shows the struggle for power and the struggle to be at the top. The use of slow motion and close ups during key power plays, when Sean parker was trying to influence Zuckerberg’s decisions during dinner and when Zuckerberg kicked Eduardo out of Facebook draws our attention to the deliberate and calculated nature of these actions, as he gets more into technology and loses touch with those around him and losses respect for gender and classes.

In “The Social Network”, the film portrays women as superficial and objectified. In this first scene, with Erica and Zuckerberg having a conversation, he converses with her like she were a dumb person and he also points out that the only reason why she is allowed in the bar is because she sleeps with the door man this was him objectifying the female gender that the only reason they get things is because of their body, and it doesn’t stop there he also goes ahead after the break up and after the hurtful and demining blog he wrote about Erica to create an app called Face mash which was based on the idea of comparing girls based off their looks and this helped in degrading the female gender in the film, the film shows that Zuckerberg has no respect for women but in the end he still sends a friend request to Erica showing that he genuinely liked her but he was hurt that she dumped her and decided to take out his anger on her, even when he met her in the bar and he just had sex with another girl he still felt the urge and need to talk to her but he still let his ego get the best of him and he ended up saying the wrong things.

The Winklevoss twins, representing old-money privilege, are consistently portrayed as out of touch and incapable of understanding Zuckerberg's disruptive vision. The mise-en-scene of Harvard's exclusive clubs versus Zuckerberg’s more humble dorm room further emphasizes the clash between old and new money. The editing also places hot or not at the beginning to indicate that this is where the idea stemmed from and how much genders are disrespected. He ends up not even caring about genders when he starts to gain more money and power.

Stuart Hall’s model states that the audience watching a film can adopt three different perspectives or interpret the film through three different lenses: dominant reading, negotiated reading, and oppositional reading. The dominant reading of the film involves viewers accepting the portrayal of Zuckerberg as a genius with arrogance and other negative traits, who sacrificed his relationships, including that with Eduardo, for the greater good of connecting the world through his app, Facebook. The audience may perceive Zuckerberg’s behavior as justified if it means achieving the success of Facebook. A negotiated reading will acknowledge that Mark is very Brillant and intelligent and look at the positive impact of Facebook but will also disagree with the means he used to achieve his success, they might say the way kicked his best friend who contributed money when he had none to the company wasn’t the proper way, they would also look at his arrogance and the way he disrespected people around him and had no regard for people’s feelings.

The oppositional reading would reject totally everything that seemed good about what Mark Zuckerberg did in the film, his actions, his emotional coldness, the betrayal, and exploitation that fueled the rise of the app Facebook. The audience might view the film as portraying the dangers and corrosive effects of power, for example, in the scene where Eduardo, his best friend and co-founder of the app, shares, are diluted just because Mark wants to be seen as the sole founder of the app Facebook. Ultimately, the decoding process is subjective and influenced by the individual viewer's social and cultural context.

The Social Network, over a decade after its release, continues to resonate as a powerful reflection of our increasingly digital world. The film’s complex portrayal of ambition, power, and the human cost of innovation remains deeply relevant in an era dominated by social media giants. By applying Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model, we can understand how the film actively encodes certain viewpoints about gender, class, the tech world, and its impacts. The real question is, as technology continues to shape our lives, can we learn from the mistakes of the past and build a more equitable and ethical future?