Written Task

Presenter: Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the documentary you have been waiting the whole week, the documentary that is going to inform you how it actually started, how it all began and how it ended to be so successful. Not only you know what I am talking about, you also use it every day to either talk to friends or just see what’s up with their life. Today we will go through the history of Facebook, and the big question we have all asked ourselves at least one, how did some college kids manage to create what is now the most accessed website in the internet.

It all started 9 years ago, the night of February 4^th 2004. It was that night when Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website, a website whose membership was limited by the founders to other Harvard students. Within days it was expanded to other colleges near the area, but today anyone who is at least 13 years old can become a member.

Today almost anyone can create a website, with all the tutorials and explanations online it became something very easy to do. So why is it that Facebook is consider so special, well, in my opinion it is the unique idea of creating an online personal profile, where you list everything about you that you want other people to know. You can chat with your friends and family, catch up with them, you can upload pictures so that your friends can see what you are up to, you can comment pictures that your friends uploaded, you can even check who’s birthday it is in case you forgot. Facebook gives us access to an online social life, not only for kids but also adults, who want to contact old friends of their childhood.

Facebook got famous not much a while ago since it was launched; Facebook did not use much money in advertisement by the time, many of the popular pages use some advertisement to get peoples attention, but this is not the case. For one reason, people just accessed the website and created their online profile, and since then, started adding friends and inviting others. It probably has happened to you that sometimes you receive an advertising email, almost like a spam that tells you to visit their page and everything. But this is not what happened with Facebook, you didn’t receive spam emails to join the page, what happened is that you received actual emails from your friends, invitations from them for you to join the site and catch up with them. Someone had a Facebook profile and told their friends, those friends told their friends until a point where almost everyone who has access to a computer and Internet has a Facebook profile. Even the president of the United States has a page, the army, celebrities; all have the same need to share what they are doing, contact their fans for example.

Something very peculiar about Facebook is that the creators didn’t look for places to advertise their website, the people who wanted to advertise looked for Facebook, and advertised their stuff on Facebook. The media also had Facebook pages, and as they want to communicate with their audience to hear their opinions, or to answer questions they shared their Facebook page to the audience, and as they shared it even more people knew about the page. It was something that just happened, like a real online social world. Facebook was something special, the need of communication through a much easier way was exactly what everyone wanted. Getting even to a point where Facebook has video calls. It literally propagated like a virus, one person had a Facebook and at the next day 20 friends of him had a Facebook profile.

To have a closer look, we have a short interview with the creator, Mark Zuckerberg.

Presenter: Welcome Mark

Mark: Hello, thank you for having me here.

Presenter: Don’t worry about that. So, Mark, tell us how you started Facebook.

Mark: You could say everything started with facemash

Presenter: What is facemash?

Mark: Facemash is a website I created on night; I was a bit drunk with some friends and we though of an idea. The idea was to put the pictures of two girls and vote for them, to see who is hotter. But why would people join, you can search for hot girls at any part of the Internet, what is special about this one is that it was based on girls we knew, or lived next door. Imagine a community where everyone is someone you know. It attracts more people to it.

Presenter: What happened after creating the website?

Mark: We started sending invitations to friends, and those friends send it to their friends, from there on it wasn’t much work what we had to do. We stop focusing on advertising the page or sending it to people, and started working on what Facebook had, the content of the page, the amount of things you could do, we worked on it almost all day.

Presenter: It was great talking to you mark

Mark: you too

Rationale: I decided to write a documentary screenplay because you can include almost everything in it, as seen in previous documentaries they have a good amount of information about the subject and they also include short interviews with people related to the subject. All this creates in the audience a wide understanding. After knowing what type of text I wanted to write I just needed to know what to write about. I had some ideas, everything related with advertising or media, and then I thought of Facebook. Why Facebook? Well its something we all use every day, we use it to many things, maybe talk to some friends, find something out about them, congratulate them on a special day. And as many people, it catches my attention on how Facebook got so famous, as I, personally never saw any advertisement of Facebook. The audience on this documentary would be any one who has any interest in Facebook, maybe users of Facebook, who like the idea, or as its part history of Facebook, maybe someone who wants to know how it all started, or maybe how it got so famous. The relation with this topic and what we have seen in class is media and advertising, how Facebook used advertisement and how did the media react to Facebook.