A review of the movie " The Social Network".

  The directors of The Social Network place a specific construction of Mark Zuckerberg's personality, one socially awkward but extremely intelligent outsider whose ambition stems in exclusion and hostility.
That is conveyed via Jesse Eisenberg's performance through his monotone voice, face insensitivity, and refusal to engage on an emotional level with other actors.

 He rarely ever makes eye contact, talks quickly and sparsely, and even appears too busy working with his code to deal with the people he is working with. These characteristics uncover Zuckerberg's personality as emotionally distant, and power and control driven rather than friendship and belonging driven. How he treated Eduardo, his only best friend, provides such isolation performance as a sign of secondary social belonging to attaining personally. The readers are encouraged to imagine Zuckerberg not only as a technocratic genius, but as a one who creates an identity of coolness and dominance by using Facebook as a tool to find visibility and pre-eminence in the social spheres that had excluded him.
  As Stuart Hall is mindful to remind us, we also know that not everyone will be reading this performance in the same manner; some will read him as an inventor betrayed (dominant reading), others will admire his intellect but not his social flaws (negotiated reading), and others will reject the description altogether, not seeing it as fair or one-sided enough (oppositional reading).

  The film's editing style portrays an important role in the construction and presentation of Zuckerberg's identity to the viewer, coding meaning beyond the performance itself. The Social Network makes wide use of parallel editing cutting between the establishment of Facebook and the legal depositions of the lawsuits that ensued. This device creates a layered picture of Zuckerberg, juxtaposing his young ambition with the fallout of his choices. The rapid cuts and anxious musical score just reinforce mood conditions of emotional disinterest and intellectual arrogance. These editorial choices make Zuckerberg calculating and icy, less interested in people than in success. The nonchronological structure also prompts the viewer to ask herself repeatedly whether he is a visionary or a villain, or both. The editing doesn't simply tell a story it performs identity by building how we understand time, morality, and character motivation. This welcomes the viewer to read Zuckerberg as a genius and affective product, someone whose identity is in perpetual negotiation via memory and consequence.

   Audiences can interpret this editing variably some will accept it as a true representation of a complicated character some will feel for him but judge his morality anyway and others will accept the editing as manipulative towards the audience's judgment unfairly.

  Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding theory affords us better comprehension of The Social Network's various meanings and audience perspective. Directors intentionally represents portions of the messages regarding who Mark Zuckerberg is through acting, structuring, and editing techniques, but they're not inevitably received. Instead, viewers provide their own social experience, belief, and background to the film that influences the way they fragment its meaning. This is a valuable theory to use in examining identity performance within the media because it reminds us that identity isn't simply represented it's performed, edited, and decoded differently by each audience. With a film like The Social Network, when the chief themes include moral complexity, ego, and ambition, decoding is radically changed. Some will agree to the intended construction of Zuckerberg as messianic genius, but others will not do so and read him instead as a heartless, unscrupulous figure defined by capitalist greed.

  Lastly, Hall's article instructs us that media meaning is not fixed identity is not simply encoded by directors but really redefined by audiences through decoding.