I’m so sick and tired of it! The hoary old complaints about how spoiled the younger generation is today. The decline of culture. Moral decadence. The alienation of human beings. The technological takeover of communication. Narcissistic flaunting of the self. Restlessness combined with apathy. Arthritis of the thumb and neck. Yet, in many cases, it was the complainers who started all this!
What was it like, twenty or thirty years ago, when they were sitting in the streetcar or the waiting room, buried in their books, in another world, as if the one around them didn’t exist? Those fanatical time managers who read even standing up. Sometimes even while they were walking. Like the student in a French film about university life who is walking down the street engrossed in a book and sinks up to his knees in a pond. That was amusing. For it inspired sympathy when students, in trying to understand the world, completely forgot the world around them.
In real life, all that readerly zeal felt more like a kind of pressure. As if it would be a waste of time to be looking around at one’s surroundings in the bus station, or spending hours staring out the train window and chatting with the passenger in the next seat, or being open, at the café, to whatever might come next. They, then, were always holding their book between themselves and the world, always had something to do, as if they didn’t have a minute to lose. And today those same individuals complain that young people don’t see the world around them!
Yes, admittedly, it can be uncanny to see everyone around us lost in their devices. You could pick your nose, make hideous faces, or murder someone in full public view without anyone noticing. On the other hand, how lost one could feel, staring straight ahead on the bus. How depressing, listening to the idle talk of colleagues over lunch. How menacing, the silence of the married couple in the restaurant. Instead of curvature of the spine, we should be talking about the happy faces that the smartphone is producing every day, eyes that are shining all over the world and among all generations—the impatient preschooler on an iPad in the waiting room, the elation of the eight-year-old sending a selfie to his friend on his mother’s cell phone, the happiness of the taxi driver getting a WhatsApp message in a traffic jam. Even the elderly wax enthusiastic when their grandchildren appear on Skype. And what is more beautiful than a young woman looking contentedly at her smartphone? The sex appeal of a person who knows what she wants and doesn’t have a moment to lose? How much more compelling than a student up to his knees in a pond!
Why, then, the outcry, given all the success? Why precisely from the people who started it all in the first place? How small-minded, to insist that there be at least one book on the device, not just Facebook or Candy Crush. How dishonest, to allow excitement only when it comes from focused reading of “worthwhile” texts? In this way, the fear of technology is paired with cultural conceit—unconsciously coupled with the mad hope that after you die life will have lost all its attractiveness anyhow. And it is not even clear why the serious book should still be preferred to distraction. All the criticism of the way young people respond to new media is based on an understanding of the world that was already outdated decades ago. That still places its bets on critique and the future instead of praising the present as it exists. Let them complain all they want about spoiled young people and cultural decline; let them mutually confirm that their era was a better era; let them assure us as convincingly as they can that now everything is going to the dogs—I cannot and will not hear any more of it.
Meanwhile, loudspeaker announcements on escalators warn us not to look at our mobile phones. Meanwhile, the police post warning videos showing texting pedestrians being brutally struck down by automobiles.1 Meanwhile, it is a daily occurrence: passersby who stare into their cell phone the way the student once stared at his book. Resistance—defiantly (head back, eyes rolled heavenward) blocking the path of pedestrians who think they can make it across crowded intersections using only “ambient attention”—seems helplessly aggressive. They simply avoid you, without looking up. The only possible way to comment on this is to turn it into an image of the future (the anti-isolation cooking pot with built-in smartphone cradle) or a kind of game: Who will be the first to find an unbroken row of ten hunched-over, phone-absorbed passengers in the subway car? A better plan is secretly (in the waiting room or the pub) to use the new technology for old-time purposes: with Kant, not Facebook, on the screen. The smartphone as Trojan horse for academics—the current era is undoubtedly a fascinating one.
What is it that bothers us (if it does bother us) when 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? Why do we think differently about the student in the pond than we do about the smartphoners in the street? Is the value we ascribe to the obsession with media dependent on the number of people who succumb to it? On the type of medium and its contents? On the social model of its marketers? Historians of media know that almost every new medium was met with skepticism and disapproval from the older generation. The complaint about the cultural decline of the young goes back before the Christian era. Yet everyone who has ever given a smartphone to a parent also knows how enthusiastically it is possible, even as a skeptic, to talk about the new technology. The situation is anything but clear.
Thus, when it comes to new media, the more educated among its detractors try to resist the impulse to condemn it too quickly. There are plenty of criticisms: capitalizing on emotions, commercializing communication, self-marketing and self-surveillance, schooling in narcissism and banality, time wasting.… It is not as if these criticisms were wrong, in principle. But we need to reflect on the arguments that support them. The reproach of time wasting, for example, only makes sense if there is a normative concept of time utilization, as there was at the height of the Enlightenment, when it was written: “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.”2 What sorts 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? Does the Enlightenment’s famous Sapere aude! still call us to continuous self-perfection? Is political and ideological communication really better than the banal and commercial kind?
The value ascribed to the cultural forms that come along with new media is inevitably politically determined, but it is also determined by a person’s philosophy of history and—no less important—is generationally specific. Teenagers talk about Facebook differently than retirees, just as they think about consumer culture differently than critical theorists. When we look at the present, we find a decreasing willingness to feel unhappy under circumstances that, from the perspective of critical theory, are catastrophic: a culture of consumerism, loss of the private sphere, alienation of the subject, environmental destruction, social ills, world-political tensions.… The trend toward acquiescence receives philosophical support from calls for positive thinking, affirmative emotions, and a childlike embrace of the world. That embrace may generally occur without orgiastic excess, but even restrained pleasure is enough to neutralize the impulse to negate the status quo, as critical theory aims to do. Society is more popular than its critics like, and the new media are, too.3
One of the main points of contact for all the smartphone users who people our urban landscapes is Facebook. Here, too, the values assigned to such problematic areas as advertising, privacy, and banality are indicative of an individual’s attitude toward society as a whole. Here, as well, a too hasty rejection only obstructs the view of deeper problems. Why, despite the weighty objections, does Facebook continue to attract ever more users? Because most humans can be seduced? Because the lock-in effect breaks down all resistance? The first response is arrogant; the second leads straight to the next question: How is Facebook achieving a critical mass, from which hardly anyone manages to escape? This book starts from the assumption that, more than a decade after the founding of Facebook, it is time to ask questions that are not satisfied by all the right answers.
For Charles Taylor, the philosopher and political scientist, a given culture, no matter how odd its views and practices may seem to observers who hold different values, is legitimated by the simple fact of its existence over a long period of time.4 The cultural values represented by Facebook (self-representation, transparency, interaction) are relatively young, but they undoubtedly enjoy broad acceptance. It may be too early to accord Facebook the legitimacy of long duration, which in light of the rapidity of digital development would be a contradiction in terms. But it is surely also too late to dismiss Facebook as an error or a fraud. The question is not by what dishonest means, for which impure purposes Facebook persuades its users to publicize their private lives. The question is: In what does the charm of this disclosure consist? What is the cultural basis for the lock-in? Why do so many people, so hopefully, still become Facebookers?
The short answer is: Facebook is cool, and it’s fun. Beyond this, one generally hears the following reasons: Facebook gives people the exciting feeling of being a public person, with a history, a series of photographs, an 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; “friending” oneself effectively makes it possible to find the inputs and discussions that are of interest to a person: gossip, news, tips about events, political activism, cultural critique, academic links; Facebook allows communication at an extremely low interaction cost; you send to everyone and you receive from everyone, without the bother of having to address and confirm the receipt of messages; Facebook makes it possible to engage with different groups, on different themes, and it also conveys the feeling of being part of a community.
All these reasons are correct, yet they remain superficial. To understand Facebook, it is necessary to look beyond Facebook. Beyond the obvious, we need to understand Facebook as the answer to a problem that perturbs the (post)modern subject more or less consciously. It must be understood as the symptom of a cultural evolution that should be thought through the lens of a philosophy of history and should not be too quickly reduced to scenarios of political oppression or economic exploitation. The political-economic consequences of the Facebook system lie deeper. For one thing, through the accumulation and analysis of personal data Facebook generates knowledge as a tool of domination; in this way, it advances the process of commercialization. For another thing, through its invitation to a kind of experience of the self that is reflexively impoverished, it produces the very subjects who are no longer dismayed by this process. This locates it within the trend of affirmative social relations, which it simultaneously promotes. Facebook is as popular as it is because it makes it possible to love the society we have.
The more weight Facebook assumes as a symptom and motor of cultural development, the more appropriate it seems to speak of a Facebook society: a society whose forms of communication and cultural techniques are significantly determined by the practices of self-representation and world perception on Facebook. This concept of society is not restricted to those individuals who are actual members of Facebook, just as one does not have to own an automobile to be part of a car culture and feel its impact every day. At the same time, the concept of Facebook society is only acceptable if Facebook is understood metonymically: as a placeholder for comparable social networks that use similar technical and social dispositifs to teach society a specific way of thinking, feeling, and acting.5 The central characteristics of Facebook society, in an overarching sense that exceeds any specific Facebook community, are all outcomes of these social networks: the disappearance of the present and the loss of reflective perception of both the world and oneself. Since both phenomena are advanced above all by Facebook, whose corporate leadership is, moreover, explicit about its ambitions to change society, this network is the most appropriate candidate for both conceptualizing and investigating these phenomena in detail.6
There are many buzzwords, mostly English or American in origin, that can be used to convey the essence of Facebook: hyperattention, multitasking, transparency, Big Data, immanence, interaction, immediacy, sharing, tagging, ranking, quantification, update, refresh, selfie, like, crowd, now. An essential phenomenon of the Facebook society, implied in many of these buzzwords, is the lack of contemporaneousness (Zeitgenossenschaft). This lack of a common temporality results from the paradoxical relationship of Facebook society to the present: It destroys the present by making it permanent. This sounds self-contradictory and counterintuitive; after all, the sharing culture that is practiced on Facebook (and other social networks) creates a situation in which more and more people document and present one another with virtually everything they experience. But precisely this compulsion to communicate prevents them 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—to anticipate one of this book’s theses—we simultaneously negate, ignore, annul it; basically, we fall out of time precisely because we are permanently capturing it. This may recall Hegel’s concept of “sublation” (Aufhebung), but in the dialectic of negation, preservation, and valorization on Facebook the third element has gone missing. The present is not raised epistemologically to a higher level but reduced to a lower one. For it is only the distanced proximity of reflection that allows us to understand the present: its complexity, its potential, its dark sides, and the alternatives that it forecloses. True contemporaneousness, according to the Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben, is precisely not possible in the mode of absolute immediacy. But Facebook society is a society of immediacy, of impatience and immersion.7
Distance, reflection, and immunity to the blinding glare of the present are what social networks such as Facebook overcome and prevent. They accomplish this through their use of spontaneous, visual, and automatized communications and potentially through the introduction of immersive augmented-reality technology. The future, Mark Zuckerberg declared in July 2015, lies in the immediate sharing of experience: “We will have AR and other devices that we can wear almost all the time in order to improve our experience and our communication.” What Zuckerberg means by improving experience and communication is the end of language as a means of communication, as it is already practiced to some degree when, for example, via Snapchat, experiences are no longer grasped in words but preserved as an image. Facebook, and with it the entire “affective-computing” industry, thus appears as the twenty-first-century response to the crisis of representation, a crisis that was growing ever more acute in the twentieth. A cure for the unreliability of language is now available in the form of nonverbal documentation. Since language is the medium of reflection through which we assume a distanced stance to the world—distance that allows us to cognize it—every attempt to move beyond language is also a loss of contemporaneousness. This loss is magnified by the advance of “mathematecized thinking,” which, as a further form of linguistic silencing, operates in thrall to numbers and in the form of algorithms. It is part and parcel of cybernetic concepts of futurity that, while they point far beyond Facebook society, essentially build on the latter’s characteristics, especially its increasing datafication and simultaneous devaluation of reflection.8
The collective self-experience of Facebook society takes place in the framework of social networks that increasingly transcend cultural memory or grand narratives. This frees them from the claims of the past and the future on the present. People get connected, without regard to any coincidence of weltanschauung or ideological commitment, in the ritual of the technical. This bracketing of the rational and ideological makes possible a semblance of community that transgresses old boundaries and that is celebrated in social theories of the intuitive and of “erotic logic.”9 But does this already ensure the capacity to tolerate, suffer, and respect the other when she gets closer to us than a status update by a Facebook friend? How well armed is the lightness of being offered by social networks, unburdened by any serious debate, against new prophets who have simple answers to complex questions and are never at loss for a “truth”? The aggression that is increasingly evident when differing positions finally meet up suggests that on this level, too, the operating mode of Facebook society fails to develop the kind of contemporaneousness that enables us, in the era of globalization and mass immigration, to develop the capacities that make for a tolerant community of difference.
Against the background of this methodological consideration and theoretical perspective, the present book devotes particular attention to psychological, narrative, and political issues and outlooks. Three theses serve as guidelines: First, behind the narcissism of restless Facebook users is the fear of their own experience, which is delegated to the network community through communication of the given moment. Second, Facebook more or less automatically, before narrative reflection, generates an episodic “autobiography” whose actual narrator is the network and its algorithms. Finally, within the framework of their superficial communication, social networks do create a cosmopolitan society that transcends political and cultural differences, but in the process they do not develop a model of tolerance that protects against the return of totalitarian narratives.
While Facebook provides the starting point for this discussion, the book’s larger purpose and goal are to understand Facebook society. In this context, it makes sense not only, occasionally, to look beyond Facebook but also to make excursions into neighboring fields and themes and to revisit earlier eras in the history of culture—philosophers and writers of past centuries and theorists of past decades. These excursions will offer insights that also follow from Agamben’s understanding of contemporaneousness through distance. One certainly could write about Facebook society without mentioning Blaise Pascal, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, Sǿren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Paul Ricœur, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Nora, Gianni Vattimo, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler. But looking at the phenomenon of Facebook together with these thinkers opens up perspectives that point beyond the usual lines of argument. By adopting this perspective, Facebook Society opens up thought spaces that, even if they cannot be explored with all the patience they deserve, may inspire further consideration and future empirical studies.