Speech + Rational

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the alumni of Harvard,

You all might try to guess who I am and why I am here, right now, standing in front of you.

My name is Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the world famous free-song App, and I'm here to tell you an uncommon story, maybe known by a few of you. A tale full of up and downs, ambition, friendship, and betrayal. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the origin of Facebook.

My friend Mark Suckenberg started just like you and me, a regular student of a worldwide known university. Pursued by mass media, successful people, and the inminent ambition of being recognized by the entire world. But how? How could a computer programmer boy, with no more than one friend, unknown by society, and no budget, be successful? Taking into consideration that globalization has taken part of our lives. All that matters is to be socially accepted.

It all started with one idea, to be “cool”. As you can notice, all of you since you entered this university, are looking for the same thing, cool friends, a nice social life. If Eduardo Saverin wasn´t Mark´s only friend, he wouldn´t be able to accomplish this task. This man would help him to finance almost every movement of Mark's ideas. One day, after Mark broke up with her girlfriend, and returned to be socially awkward, he realized that hooking up with hot girls/boys was the main trouble of many students, so he made a website to match you with your “crush” (the person you like) just by clicking "like" in his profile photo.

As the site started to gain popularity between the Harvard university alumni, to keep it working, the two boys needed to improve their technological equipment so it could support the connection of many students at a time, so, as that wasn’t for free, Eduardo took the financial position of the project with the help of his father’s bank account, taking the 30% of the earnings as Mark took the 70% by typing day and night, lines, and lines, and lines, of codes. Until this point, we haven’t seen any fight between the two friends, but now it’s when the things are starting to heat up. The extrovert, Eduardo Saverin, was accepted to join the Phoenix Club, as you may know more than me, the coolest club you can join in this institution, but in the other hand, we have the introvert Mark Suckenberg, who didn’t stand a chance to join, so as Eduardo started to gain popularity, Mark’s envy began to blossom.

My entrance to this project was not during the best time. My ambition influenced Mark’s perspective, and in some way helped to leave his best friend aside. I knew that this project was my chance to get out of the hole where Napster left me, but I never thought that I was able to do such a horrible thing, destroy what really is important in our lives: Friendship. My idea of success was wrong: step over everything until you achieve what you want because life is a race where there is no one you can trust. Mark, motivated by my ideas, knew that Eduardo would never doubt in his words so he lied about the content in the contract he signed, expelling him from the project with less that 1% of the stock shares so he had no longer power in the decisions of the company. Ambition of power and money led Mark to betray his very best friend. You may think that this was the end of the story, but unfortunately we have still more bad news about these 2 characters; Eduardo Saverin sued his ex-best friend Mark for a gigantic amount of money, clarifying that there is no way anymore to be friends again.

What I’m trying to tell you with this story, is that no matter what you are trying to achieve, you MUST always think in the people involved and how will your achievement affect them, because ambition is able to blind you completely, even more at your age! You may think I’m crazy, but you never know what you are capable of until ambition knocks at your door! Most of you are making decisions everyday following your emotions, but it’s time to make a change, THINK WITH YOUR HEAD!

Ladies and gentlemen, would you like to sacrifice the only thing that money cannot buy, friendship, for being a lonely powerful billionaire. Is Mark Suckenberg really successful? Is he really happy thinking about betraying his only friend? I cannot give you the answer to that question, but I can tell you that as frantic ambition is a poison, your family, friends, relationships, are the only remedy to establish a balance.

Thank you for listening, have a nice day.

Rationale:

This written task is based in the film ‘The Social network’, a movie that we watched in class for a better comprehension of the part 2 of the IB English course, which belongs to Language and mass communication. Now, I decide to write a speech about how the ambition is able to damage our relationships by speaking from Sean Parker’s perspective. I chose this character to develop this theme because he takes a conflictive role in the movie as his ambition distorted Mark’s mind so he betrayed his best friend, therefore we have the precise vision of the deed for a deep reflection and development of what has being studied in class. My speech is not based in a single person’s method, but my general knowledge about how a speech is established in terms of structure and style to keep the audience paying attention to the speaker, alluding to rhetorical devices like repetitions, and exclamations marks to emphasize in the message, not to mention the strong presence of pathos (ethos and logos in a second layer) because as the audience of this speech are mainly young adults, they best way to keep them interested is with strong emotions

I think I accomplished the task belonging to language and mass media by applying all the elements I said before, because it shows clearly reflects the power that media has and how it works in the audience, changing everyone’s point of view.