The Facebook Effect pgs 1-106

The first part of The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick goes through the beginning stages of facebook of how Mark Zuckerberg originally got the ideas for facebook and how he worked with his friends to begin to make facebook what it is today.  The book makes sure to present Zuckerberg and his friends as young college students who live a common college lifestyle.  Kirkpatrick also makes sure to point out all the mistakes the young creators of facebook made along the way.

Kirkpatrick points out that facebook's founders were young and made legal mistakes along the way not only because it makes the book more interesting, but because it shows how young the technology and computer industry have become.  Books such as Computers and videos we have watched in class describe how since technology advances so fast so do people.  This means that like older technology people can easily become obsolete in the industry.  In Kirkpatrick's book, Zuckerberg is described as having the capability of creating programs that people enjoy using.  It seems that all the network pages that Zuckerberg created before facebook people also liked using as well.  The reason why Zuckerberg had this capability was because he was young and he knew what other people his age would enjoy using.  Zuckerberg also when asked in the earlier stages why he was making this site, his answer was that he did it for fun not profit.  This is probably why facebook is as successful as it is today and also why it ran into a good amount of legal problems.  Since it was for fun, Zuckerberg did not sell his site to the first bidder and remains in control of the company, thus allowing the site to keep its aesthetic that people have come to enjoy using.  The legal troubles come in, because when one is not trying to make money off of something one usually does not worry about others trying to take credit (in other words money) for what one has made.

The way this effects American culture is that these new technologies are forcing people to enter this marketing world at a young age.  They have the technology knowledge and fresh minds that allows them to do well, but lack business experiences which opens them up to be taken advantage of.  Once again our laws and education practices are not really keeping up with technology.  In order to fix this problem two things can be done, we must hold back on accepting new technologies right when they come out, or we must be willing to update our old system of learning and rules to change faster with the time.  For some reason our culture is willing to accept new technology blindly, but is unwilling to change outdated ways of life.