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.
