next eight minutes of The Social Networkdepict his
discovery of the Internet’s latent power to enthrall
and connect its users.
The story conveyed in those eight minutes
includes the following: still stinging from Erica’s
rejection, Mark blogs a blistering critique of his
new ex-girlfriend. Then, an offhand comment from
one of his roommates gives Mark an idea. What if
he could create a way for other students to com-
pare pairs of female Harvard students and vote on
which woman is hotter? Mark hacks into each of
the university’s dormitory “Face Book” photo ros-
ters and downloads every possible female resident
photo. His friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), hav-
ing read Mark’s blog, drops by to console him and
winds up getting pressured into creating an algo-
rithm to automatically select and pair photos, then
collate and come up with new pairings based on the
results. Mark and Eduardo write the necessary
code, and “Facemash” goes up on the campus net-
work. Students all across Harvard discover and
play and recommend Facemash. The explosion of
online participation crashes the university’s com-
puter network.142 CHAPTER 4 ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE
13524Plot and story in The Social NetworkThe deliberate
structure of selected events, as well as nondiegetic elements
such as a rhythmic musical score and titles marking the
passage of time, comprise the plotthat delivers the storyof
Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking epiphany. Causality
guides the filmmakers’ plot choices: Mark gets a diabolical
idea [1], downloads dormitory resident photos [2], uses
computer code and an algorithm to create an online game
comparing relative female hotness [3], which rapidly
escalates into an Internet sensation [4] that crashes the
Harvard network——which delights Mark [5]. The specific
events and their particular arrangement are plot; the events,
along with other actions and meaning they imply but don’t
show, are the story.