Facebook-Gesellschaft

by Roberto Simanowski

Zehn Jahre nach seiner Gründung im Jahr 2004 ist Facebook das größte soziale Netwerk der Welt und einer der mächtigsten Global Player des Internet. Der Reiz dieses Netzwerks liegt auf der Hand: die geballte Kommunikation mit vielen, die Lust der Selbstdarstellung, die Zeugenschaft im Leben der anderen, die reichlichen, pflegeleichten Bekanntschaften, das Wiedersehen alter Freunde etc.. Auch die Negativseite ist hinlänglich bekannt: die Kapitalisierung des Privaten, Überwachung, Selbstdarstellungszwang, Zeitverschwendung. Es gibt etablierte Neologismen und umfangreiche Studien zu Facebook. Zugleich gibt es viele Klischees und Leerstellen in der Reflexion, was Facebook ist und wie es die Gesellschaft verändert.

Das vorliegende Buch untersucht das Phänomen Facebook aus geschichtsphilosophischer, kulturwissenschaftlicher und gedächtnistheoretischer Perspektive. Es vertritt vier Thesen: Hinter dem Narzissmus rastloser Facebook-Nutzer steckt die Angst vor sich selbst; man will das Eigene beim andern loswerden, um nicht selbst damit umgehen zu müssen. Der expandierte Small Talk auf Facebook rettet das Projekt der Post-Moderne vor der Rückkehr der Legitimationserzählungen. Facebook stattet jeden Nutzer mit einer dokumentarischen, mehr oder weniger automatisierten Autobiographie aus, deren primäre Autoren und Leser die Algorithmen am back end des Interface sind. Die Hyper-Attention und Zerstreuung auf Facebook und im Internet insgesamt führt perspektivisch zum Ende des kollektiven Gedächtnisses und scheint so den Boden zu bereiten für Kommunikation jenseits der Kultur.


Was ist die Facebook-Gesellschaft?
Eine Gesellschaft, deren Kommunikationsformen und Kulturtechniken maßgeblich durch die Praktiken der Selbstdarstellung und Weltwahrnehmung auf Facebook bestimmt sind. Die Facebook-Gesellschaft ist eine Ungedulds- und Immersionsgesellschaft mit den Merkmalen: Hyperattention, Multitasking, Transparenz, Big Data, Interaktion, Ranking, Update, Selfie, Like, Jetzt.

265 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Roberto Simanowski is a German scholar of media and cultural studies and the author of Digital Art and Meaning, Data Love, Facebook Society, Waste: A New Media Primer, and The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (the last two published by the MIT Press).

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to read or to review. It appears to be inspired by a key observation: if Facebook can be considered a mass media, the culture it supports and encourages can be analyzed using the tools and ideas developed for mass media by thinkers such as Adorno and Benjamin. It allows us to look at Facebook and other social networks as platforms evolving out of, say, newspapers, photography, movies, radio or television and aligned with and influencing certain political and social trends.

In the preface, Simanowski provocatively asks what the difference between readers so immersed in their books (nose-in-a-book readers) they cannot stop reading and are distracted from their concrete surroundings, and users immersed in Facebook or similar platforms on their mobile phones:

What is it that bothers us (if it does bother us) when we we see people all around us immersed in their devices? What do we lack when they ignore us? Are we disappointed that they so brutally avoid the encounter with us? Are we concerned that they are running away from themselves?

Are we worried Facebook users are wasting time:

The reproach of time wasting only makes sense if there is a normative concept of time utilization as in the Enlightenment: “Reading merely to pass the time is immoral, for every minute of our lives is filled up with duties that we may not neglect without besmirching ourselves” What sort of duties fill up our lives today? Is there still a sociopolitical goal for which we ought to be putting ourselves on the line every day and every hour? [...] Is political and ideological communication really better than the banal and commercial kind?

Such questions shake us out of complacency and encourage deeper thinking about society and its use of Facebook. Simanowski believes in a Facebook culture which:

...teaches society a specific way of thinking, feeling, and acting [...] a culture of immediacy, impatience, and immersion

which encourages a certain type of self-representation based on a sui generis blend of opaqueness and transparency, and pre-established, limited and tightly controlled patterns of interaction. From a more philosophical viewpoint, Facebook culture channels the compulsion to communicate but

... prevents people from actually experiencing the present. The more or less reflexive, more or less unreflecting documentation of the lived moment replaces its real experience. By archiving the present […] we simultaneously negate, ignore, annul it; basically we fall out of time precisely because we are permanently capturing it.

The preface provides provocative questions and assertions, but in somewhat haphazard and occasionally confusing way.

The book is divided into three chapters, an afterword and an epilogue to the English edition.

The first chapter, titled Stranger Friends closely analyses the meaning of Facebook “friend” and points out that Facebook's mechanisms are geared towards maximizing the number of such “friends”. Such relationships are designed to be without cost, friction, or risk. As the author points out:

The social network becomes an archive of social relationships that can be more or less reactivated and intensified at any time and that often comes to mind again only when the system announces the other's birthday.

He also analyzes the culture of “likes”, the social pressure that leads to post a lovely life and the ensuing temptation to incur in manipulated reporting, self-deception, and depression and to give up privacy:

We look at reality with a “Facebook eye” that seeks to determine how what we have “experienced” can be presented most favorably and with the promise of the most likes [....] It is not the social network that separates us from social life; it is the felt lack of a real life that makes the social network so attractive as a “respectable” way out.

In this chapter, Simanowski also starts to look at photography as clever means to flee confrontation with realities that force us into self-reflection, a matter he will analyse in far more detail in his second chapter:

Tourists use cameras, in the service of future memories, they ruthlessly toss away the present and sacrifice the dignity of seeing to the archive. The overwhelming majority have no wish to experience say the Alhambra, preferring instead that the camera should. What we can take home as a photograph is exorcised. That there are better photographs on the Internet is no argument when what matters is not having the most beautiful photo but that, as Kafka suggested, “We photograph things in order to drive them out of mind.” The defense would argue for the photograph as an occasion for thought, with whose help the photographer will later do what he has no time or desire to do in the experiential moment, namely, construct a personal relationship to this object, this situation. Note the difference between when films were developed months or years later and today when the slide show brooks no delay, but instantly -minus the narrative effort- appears on the social network, the time for future recollection has gone missing. The archive of images fills up too quickly for us to have the energy to return to them. The more photos we take, the less we see.

Chapter two, Automatic autobiography is the crux of the book. Facebook encourages self-disclosure, and Simanoski rightly looks at this more deeply:

What is the charm of self-disclosure? […] Facebook gives people the exciting feeling of being a public person, with a history, a series of photographs, and audience, and fan letters: Facebook allows individuals to look into the lives of others, as a kind of “television” (remote seeing), with figures from their own biography as the characters...

The sequence of self-disclosures we post on Facebook, constitutes an autobiography of sorts. Simanowski analyses what kind of autobiography this is and comes to deeply interesting conclusions, it is an autobiography made out of spontaneous snapshots of present moment which are not reflected upon, an autobiography based on a collage of small talk, selfies, likes and snapshots.

Along with spontaneous showing, there is also automatic showing [..] the platform inserts specific actions by internet users -visits, likes, shares, or comments -directly into their timelines. Thus actions describe the individual.

An episodic rather than a narrative autobiography:

Narrative history offers a finalized, retrospectively recounted and coherent assemblage of events that [is] anchored in a solid network of causes and effects.

Facebook is not interested in causes and effects but in computing correlations that provide effective, revenue-producing advertising predictions. For this it needs to capture data that can be processed to produce effective consumer profiles. Simanowki points out how this can be done more efficiently using “posthuman” approaches that lead Facebook:

1. From words to numbers, replacing textual descriptions by statistical information as in the Quantified Self movement;

2. From mechanical to automatic processes when inputs are no longer consciously entered by the subject but are involuntarily provided by the body or, as in the case of Snapchat, emerge spontaneously and more or less unconsciously;

3. From option to duty, when the creation and analysis of data is longer initiated by the person who produces it but is forcibly imposed or secretly undertaken by employers, insurance companies, or government agencies... or technological platforms driven by data as a commodity.

Thus, Facebook has no interest in providing narrative autobiographies; its interests lead to:

Autobiography on Facebook is incoherent, hypertextual and multimedial. The sovereignty of the autobiographer is fundamentally compromised when, following the “authority of the form”, users adhere to the value assumptions and standardizations on lists of questions and categories. It is further weakened by the montage created when a person's own status updates are combined with the comments and status updates of friends. It is utterly lost when [Facebook's underlying] algorithm becomes a “ghostwriter” with plans of its own.

This chapter repays close readings and is much richer than I have been able to suggest.
Chapter 3, Digital Nation, purports to analyse Facebook's role with regards to (collective) memory, forgetting, archiving, remembering, accessing, and recollecting. I must confess, the chapter lost me early on and, at some point, I starting wondering whether whole swathes of it have very little relation to the topic of Facebook Society, and whether the author simply got carried away and lost the thread of his book.

The afterword is a glimpse of possible futures for Facebook and a summation of sorts:

If we turn from speculation about future technological constellations to an analysis of contemporary media interactions, the result of our discussion of Facebook and Facebook society can be summarized as follows:

First, permanent talk about oneself on social media is flight from the events occurring in a person's life; we are exhibitionistic not because we are narcissists but because we cannot bear ourselves and the present[...]

Second, self-representation on FB happens less in a way that is narratively reflective than as a spontaneously episodic and documentary event. The outcome is a quasi-automatic autobiography whose central narrative authority is the network with its algorithms. The self-image that is presented by FB is pointillist, postmodern, and posthuman.

Finally, information management on FB and the internet suppresses collective memory. With its lack of narrative points of reference...it creates a quasi-cosmopolitan community that transcends cultural values and national barriers. However, the avoidance of discursive interaction prevents the development of skeptical, meta-reflexive thought as long-term security against new forms of assertive dogmatism

The epilogue to the English edition is a 2018 addendum to the 2016 book in German. Curiously enough, this has dated worse than the rest of the book, perhaps because it focuses on Zuckerberg's optimistic (hubristic?) 2017 manifesto and just before the Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded in 2018, as the first in a number of scandals that have placed many design principles and claims about Facebook under critical scrutiny and increasing jeopardy.

It is probably worth mentioning that the notes to the chapters and the book's bibliography make up a whopping 45% of the book. In my opinion, the book is very uneven, its arguments are sometimes hard to follow, and it sometimes relies on rather convoluted and specialized theories and writings which I was not familiar with and with which the author assumed familiarity. The preface merits two stars, the first chapter oscillates around three stars, the second chapter occasionally hits four stars, the third chapter stumbles into one star, the afterword climbs back to stars and the epilogue dips somewhat lower. In my opinion, the book is written for digital humanists familiar with a great many topics in the philosophy of media; for the rest of us, it is a hard slog, rewarding at times, and extremely frustrating at others.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has interesting points in this book. However, I find the sentences here highly convoluted, and that makes the reading experience hard (at least for me). It has lots of verbs in passive voice. The author used too many words or phrases that can be expressed in simple sentences It feels like this book will appeal to those in academics but not for those ordinary folks like me who use Facebook in a daily basis. I wish that the writing style is easier to read.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you Net Gallery for this copy of Facebook Society by Roberto Simanowski.

This book was a little too technical for me. I felt like it was just dissecting words through the whole book and it was not as many pages as suggested.

I'm sorry this just wasn't want I thought it would be like the description.


Cherie'

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Simanowski does not get a lot of things. In this particular case Simanowski does not get Facebook. And that scares him badly. And like any smart 6 year old, he knows that every individual, or at least most of them, feels the same.

[Annarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting read about the psychological effect of social network and content sharing (or over sharing).
A book that should be read by each of us who are active on social networks
Highly Recommended!
Many thanks to Columbia University Press and Netgalley for this ARC

[Justine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Facebook Society by Roberto Simanowski offers readers insight into the undeniable psychological effects that social media has on our society. Although I don't completely agree with everything this book says and I can't say I like the melodramatic examples Simanowski weaves, I still recommend people to read it. Facebook Society is a book filled with nourishing factual information and intellectual philosophy from the perspective of a scholar of digital media and culture.