Facebook and Philosophy

I mean, there you are, offering an endless bazaar of attractions like a candy-coated cyber carnival, and I haven’t even taken the “How German are you quiz” and I still haven’t figured out which “The Hills” character I am. You know, basic stuff like that.

I have yet to cast my vote in the toilet paper debate poll. I can’t even bring myself to care enough to browse through the 77 requests piling up on my homepage. I ought to at the very least become a fan of Sully and join the group dedicated to hating stupid people. Sure, I’ve got 135 friends, but there are dozens of high school acquaintances that I have yet to collect. I set you as my homepage but I still can’t muster the oomph to get lost in your labyrinth. I navigate to my e-mail or, worse, I click over to the New York Times. And when I find a good story there I don’t even take the time to post it on my FB profile. What the heck is wrong with me? I don’t deserve you.

And, no, I am not going to chase after Twitter. Geez, you are so insecure about her. Sure she’s younger and lots of rich and famous twits are tweeting pictures of each other’s butts. But come on, you know I’m too old and lazy for that sort of thing. Besides, I’m not looking for someone so immature. I plan on spending more time in the real world doing the whole face-to-face thing.

My wife loves you so much that she calls you Crack Book. “Aren’t you just addicted to this thing?” she chirps at me as she updates her status and posts a million pictures of our daughter with tags and captions. All of my FB friends like something different about you. That one Buddhist chick seems to really dig the opportunity to spout vacuous platitudes about enlightenment and love; my old hockey teammate uses you to pimp his nightclub by posting pictures of all the “hotteez” that can be spotted there; my colleague delights in lampooning conservatives. Though everyone sees something different, they all like what they see. They all find something valuable in you.

So, why can’t I? Sure, I’m just not the social networking type. That’s part of it—different strokes for different folks. But there’s more to it than that. In truth, over the past few years my hopes have been dashed. I had hoped that with you and through you I would find conviviality. But I was wrong. Indeed, this may be the only thing in all your coffers and cavities that I didn’t find. Again, it’s entirely my fault for buying into all the new media hype when you were new on the scene. I idealized you, which ultimately was-n’t fair to either of us. And although I know you will hardly notice the loss of one tiny profile in your galaxy, I thought you at least deserved an explanation for this small gesture of retreat from the information age.

Before you arrived, we had something called “the media”—radios, televisions, newspapers. But then in a warm California valley, the Internet spun the first thread of its web. It metastasized across the continent, spreading into Europe and Asia. The web crept through walls, attached to screens, and suddenly every face was lit by its eerie radiance. But not only were faces glowing; hands were typing. Especially with user-generated websites, information began to flow both ways, all ways, and always. You arrived along with others, including your nemesis Friendster, and offered a space to create and connect. Instead of regularly programmed shows beamed at us, we had an open-ended license to do the beaming. Consumers became producers, or “prosumers,” and media production was dispersed. This was new. So, we called it “new media” and what I had known as a kid became “old” and, I guess, so did I.

Of course new media did not simply displace the old. In some ways they now synergize. But you and your siblings do have some strikingly novel features such as digitality and hypertext. Most importantly, you have shifted the definition of “medium” from a channel to a place. Old media generally involve a sender sending a message through a medium to a receiver. The medium is a channel that information is transferred through. This is what you have subverted. New media are not channels, but places. These places can resemble our traditional notion of a geometric place (think: Second Life). But they can also be located in a topological or abstract space. I write on my FB homepage, I have friends’ numbers in my FB phonebook, and I go back and forth between my homepage and friends list.

You’re not a channel for transferring information, but an environment or a cyberspace where information lives and is made available. Moreover, it’s hard to distinguish you and the information: you both constitute and contain information. If I were to extract the contents of my FB profile and dump them onto a word document, much of their meaning would be lost. How things are put together matters. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “The medium is the message.” You and other new media offer many-to-many communication and interactivity. This cannot happen with a channel, because it requires a “place” where many can leave and retrieve information. Furthermore, manipulating, searching, and choosing information (and the way it is presented) requires information that is made available rather than transferred through channels. Interactivity means more choice. It is not just on or off, but also what, when, how, and with whom.

You and your new media kin were not just a bundle of new technological affordances. You were also the promise that these affordances could reconfigure society for the better. Now this is where I got caught up in the hype and began to idealize you. It was a classic case of Stendhal’s crystallization theory of love. You, the beloved, were reduced to an empty receptacle for my fantasies, the “pretty diamonds” that hide the “hornbeam twig” that is the beloved as she really is. Reality was bound to sink in sooner or later. Perhaps if I explain the ideal I formed of you, you will see how unfair and foolish it was.

It all went wrong, not surprisingly, with the Marxists. I was an impressionable college student ready to trade in my bourgeois existence for something more authentic (or sexier or something). I found the Frankfurt School of critical social theory especially attractive, because they were able to diagnose the dispiriting ennui of modern, plastic, suburban life. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called it the “culture industry,” which churns out false needs and the semblance of freedom (I can choose which television program to watch), but appropriates everything into the process of consumption, which we are not free to choose not to participate in. It offers nothing of genuine substance and no real alternatives. It lulls us into accepting its pre-given ends, orders our lives around them, and ratchets up our anxiety about how to acquire as many of those goods as possible. Herbert Marcuse called this existence “one-dimensional.” The social-technical “apparatus” operates autonomously and habituates individuals to conform to the dominant patterns of thought and behavior, thus serving as a pervasive instrument of social control behind a false façade of individual choice and autonomy.

Rats on the wheel. It’s not just that people become enrolled in systems and thus physically dependent. It’s that they become radically, psychically dependent in the sense that they take their own self-image and goals from the culture industry. Old media—no, let’s call them by their true name: mass media—play a central role in perpetuating this insidious, banal form of oppression. This is so, not because of the content they transfer (Seinfeld was clearly not plying its boot to our throats), but because of their form or structure. The French Marxist Louis Althusser argued that ideology should be understood as the form of mass media, not just its content. “Ideology-in-general” constitutes individuals as subjects—it is the very condition by which an individual comes to have a representation of self and world. The kind of selfhood that emerges and the world it takes as reality depend on the structure or form of the communication.

The implication is that media do not deliver a representation (either neutral or distorted) of reality. Rather, they create reality. And because of their commercial, hierarchical, one-to-many broadcast structure, old media created a reality and a subjectivity of solitary, impersonal, and passive consumption.

But if media create reality, then new media create a new, maybe better, reality! Technology need not be inherently repressive; it can transform the logic of domination into a world of genuine freedom, creative self-expression, and happiness. The Marxists were not the only ones drunk on utopian visions. In time, the Internet became a receptacle for nearly every stripe of utopian fantasy. There were Platonic visions of escaping the contingency of place and the shackles of mortal flesh. There were cyber-cowboy libertarian visions of radical individualism and free-market capitalism on the electronic frontier. There were communitarian visions of an enriched public sphere and collaborative knowledge production. There were cosmopolitan visions of a global village. And there were post-modern visions of endless play with identity.

So, the general sentiment was: old media bad, new media good. Overcoming the passivity and homogeneity of the broadcast architecture meant lots of things to different people—emancipation, enfranchisement, community, and creativity. What it meant to me—especially when it came to you and other social networking sites—was conviviality. This was the diamond I adorned you with. And I thought I had good reason for doing so.

By the time I set up my FB profile, I had moved on from the Marxists. I guess I was too sheltered to identify with the rhetoric of class. Besides, I had found someone who offered both a more penetrating critique of modernity and a more tangible alternative. His name was Ivan Illich. He was born in Vienna in 1926, studied everything, learned to speak every major language on the European continent, and was ordained a Catholic priest. In the 1950s, he was posted to the US as a pastor to Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. He became so beloved by the people that he was appointed Vice-Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. There, he began to launch a radical critique of policies promoting economic and technological modernization, or “development.” His works inspired a generation of social critics. They also infuriated the Catholic Church. He was accused by the Vatican of becoming a scandal to the Church and was subjected to a kind of inquisition. Illich died in 2002 after having lived for years with a cancerous growth on his face that he coolly referred to simply as “my mortality.”

What does Illich have to do with you, especially since he died two years before you drew your first breath in the cyber-ivy of Harvard? Well, he articulated the promise of new media, especially social networking sites, for reforming modern life. That life has amassed material abundance at a grave spiritual price. Genuine human community characterized by the kind of spontaneous giving seen in the parable of the Good Samaritan has been displaced by an impersonal society composed of institutions and professionals that provide “services.” We take our self-image from those service providers, coming to think of ourselves as in need of their wares. We become dependent, submissive consumers of education, health, energy, transportation, and entertainment. At some point, development or modernization went haywire and we found ourselves with less genuine freedom and less authentic relationships despite the promise of “progress.”

Something is missing, something that “undeveloped” cultures have. Illich calls it an interpersonal proportionality, or a fitting together. A relationship with another person is the good of human kind; it is what orients life, giving us the reason for our existence. Illich sees in Jesus’s message an ideal of community as a skein of relations between particular people who find in one another their proportionality, their balance. Jesus rejected power in the name of freedom—freedom not in the sense of absence of obstacles, but in the sense of the active, creative impulse to make one’s way through life together with friends. This introduces a new possibility of love necessarily hitched to extreme vulnerability, because any attempt to guarantee it through external power would instead squash it. The modern world has embraced power in order to grant security and comfort. Illich sees in this move a tragic loss of active freedom and genuine personal relating.

It’s a loss of conviviality, a term that is not surprisingly linked to friendship, that paragon of freely chosen personal relationship. By “conviviality,” Illich means “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons . . . in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others and by a man-made environment” (Tools for Conviviality, 1973, p. 11). It is “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.” A convivial society is one “in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers” (p. xxiv). This was not the stuff of mass media.

But conviviality, or so I thought, is what you offered. We didn’t need class war. And we didn’t need to abandon modern tools—just reform them. And conviviality serves as a standard by which to guide this reform. It provided design criteria. What makes a tool convivial? First in broad terms: “Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision” (p. 21). “Industrial tools,” such as the mass media, deny this possibility to those who use them. Their designers and managing operators determine the meaning and expectations of others.

Illich then lays out a series of more specific technical requirements that convivial tools must meet. Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which a. they can be easily used by anyone, as much or as little as desired, for a self-chosen purpose; b. their existence does not impose any obligation to use them; c. their use by one person does not restrain another from using them; d. they do not require previous certification of the user; and e. they allow the user to express his meaning in action (the user is not reduced to a mere operator). Most hand tools are convivial. The telephone is also a “structurally convivial tool,” because it “lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice” (p. 22). No central manager defines what people say on the phone.

And then you came along. You seemed to fit all of these criteria. And if the phone is a convivial tool, then how could a user-generated, multi-media, content delivery website with hug-me apps be anything less? At first, I admit it, I was promiscuous—I had profiles on Friendster, Xanga, and others whose names I cannot recall. But those other flings fizzled as you patiently won me over. My friends all settled into your arms. Let the conviviality begin, I thought.

So, what went wrong? I take all the blame. I made two mistakes: apathy and naïveté. First, I should have put more effort into our relationship and the relationships with others that we could have built together. I should know better than to presume that tools bring about states of affairs (convivial or otherwise) in a deterministic fashion. User intent and action is all-important. And I am sure if you were ever to show this letter to another FB user, he would scoff and recall the many times he created genuine interpersonal relations.

But although tools are not deterministic, neither are they neutral or equally pliable to any use imaginable. A spoon can serve as a screwdriver in a pinch, but it won’t offer a functional replacement for an airplane wing. You, like any tool, have a certain grain or contour. And when I fell onto you like a little drop of water I found myself subtly channelled away from conviviality toward what I can only describe as a kind of reluctant, hapless exhibitionism. Others may well have worked against the grain to succeed where I failed. Be this as it may, this was where I was naïve—I misdiagnosed your structure and its implications. And, I suspect that if you were to show this letter to other FB users, they might resonate with this point. Some of us, I suppose, fell victim to a kind of bait and switch. We came for the conviviality, but we stayed for the zaniness. And I’m not staying any longer. By no means do others need to follow me out the door. But we ought to at least recognize what has happened.

Another way to put the point is to return to the Marxists—this time to Herbert Marcuse’s student, Andrew Feenberg—and note that all tools have their internal contradictions. You especially seem riven with contradiction and ambiguity. You liberate and confine, empower and ensnare. Yes, you could be a tool for conviviality. And I think that half of the story is the more obvious one: friends are free to seek out friends, to pass along notes of encouragement, to share pictures . . . to enrich their world with fruits of their own creation. But you are Janus-faced. On one side you are a tool that one actively masters and freely uses to invest the world with one’s own meaning. On the other side you are a tool by which one is passively acted upon and subjected to determinations of self-image. This other face of Facebook is less obvious, but more powerful. Let me try to explain what I mean.

One thing that makes you distinct from the telephone and that makes you more than just “e-mail with benefits” is the public nature of your cyberspaces. I am thinking in particular of my News Feed and my wall and other aspects of my profile. Now I am free to say and post anything I want there, right? Free to populate them with fruits of my own creation? Well, because of the mixed audience potentially viewing these public expressions (friends, colleagues, family, that Buddhist chick, and so on). I do not feel all that free. In fact, I begin to sympathize with the mass media broadcasting corporations that have to produce content suitable for everyone. In these spaces, I am not playing with my identity or expressing myself so much as trying to purify a neutral self suitable for broadcasting to the viewing mass. It is the art of self-censorship in an attempt to handle the collision of life contexts that normally remain separate. I have seen innocent comments spin out a thread of ran-cor, because what is best said to one is best said otherwise to another and not at all to a third.

You ask that the private be consumed in public. I try to do this, and I find a voice, but it is not the authentic voice that Illich has in mind for convivial relations. Close friendships need this voice and the barriers that protect it. The interpersonal and the social are not the same; indeed the latter can deform or dilute the former. I know; I can hear you telling me that all I had to do was tailor my privacy settings. But hardly anyone I know does this. Besides, how far can we push this practice before it destroys the very logic of social networking and we are back to one-to-one e-mails? Circumstances will often call for different interactions even amongst those that I would lump into a “close friends” category. I know that not everyone is as sensitive as I am to this ambiguity—some things my wife tells you make me cringe. But I suspect that most people, at least unconsciously, are doing more persona management than spontaneous relating.

So, one way I found myself steered away from conviviality was by your odd recapitulation of the broadcast media architecture. True, there are no centralized, structural limits on my freedom of expression, but there are subtler capillaries of power that substitute the third-person perspective for my own first-person voice. The second force driving me away from conviviality is, frankly, that you are out of shape. I mean it literally—you don’t have a shape. You are not just a new version of broadcast media, but a new version of mass media, where “mass” means the medium itself is an undifferentiated lump. Now, don’t get offended; just let me explain . . .

For all the invectives I have heaped on the old media, at least they provide orientation. There is a clear hierarchy of senders (few) and receivers (many). One can find one’s way around, because there are only a limited number of channels. The new media have leveled this hierarchy and opened the floodgates. This is democratizing, sure, but also disorienting. It conjures the nihilistic image of Friedrich Nietzsche when, in The Gay Science §125, he has a mad-man declare that God is dead and ask: “Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?” This is precisely how I feel whenever I hang out with you. I am plunging dizzily through threads of comments and down hyperlinked wormholes. I quickly crawl back out like a queasy kid freshly tossed from the merry-go-round looking to hold onto something, anything.

You don’t offer me any orientation—everything is as potentially important or interesting as everything else. There’s no focal point where the lines cross. No level spot where the bubble sits poised in the middle. Yes, you say, so now I am free to determine on my own what is most important. Isn’t that the kind of spontaneous authenticity Illich had in mind? Yes, I have that freedom now, but in order to exercise it with you, I would need to prune most of your branches to create a clearing within which meaningful exchanges can happen. I would need to throw thick blankets over most of your brilliant, glowing tentacles, because otherwise I would be too tempted by them—I would lack the discipline needed to focus on any one relationship. I would wander, piddling away my energies in a thin stream that would, in the end, amount to nothing more than distraction. Again, as with the privacy settings, I would have to work against your grain—this time, not to limit my exposure, but rather to limit my dizziness.

I think that in both cases I could work on you, shaping you like a bonsai tree into a more convivial form. But you would hardly be your glorious, wacky, multi-faceted self when I was done with you. And like I said, I am too apathetic for that. Actually, I think most of your users are. What I see out there are not thoughtful people forming a convivial cyber-community. Rather, I see people distracted from distraction by distractions. I see fragmentation and partial-attention disorder galore. I see a lot of scurrying along the surface, commenting on the fleeting moment and forgetting it as soon as the relentless newsfeed pushes it south of screenshot. There may be an orienting logic, an iron anchor in this post-modern crush of information. But I can’t make it out. I can’t feel its pull. And without such a focus, there is no place for conviviality to germinate. Each friend collected gets less of our time. We are spread thinner than the screen itself.

I’m sorry if I hurt you with this. I have never been good with break-ups. Maybe one way to put a positive spin on it is to ask: are there lessons to be learned from my sorry tale of overblown expectations and misplaced optimism? I worry that one lesson may be that you fail Illich’s second criterion for conviviality. That is, that your existence may begin to impose obligations on people to sign-up. Already teenagers are starting to sense that if they are not on MySpace or Facebook, then they don’t have a social life. Be a technological adopter or be an outsider. Being tuned-in online is fast becoming simply “what one does,” rather than a self-chosen commitment. This is a kind of inauthenticity written into modern technology, as it tends to develop according to its own rules rather than any individual choice. I hope that losing you does not mean losing friendships. I don’t think this is true for me and my generation. But it may well be true for my daughter and hers. I only hope that they do not unthinkingly equate more chatting with better relationships, more texting with conviviality.

The bigger lesson is just how silly it was of me to expect new media, let alone a single website, to deliver on the promise of a more convivial society. I want to be able to say that I was really looking for a serious, mature relationship while you just kept putting on that big red nose and stepping into your oversize shoes. But, truth be told, we users are the ones who dress you like a clown. For all the talk lately of how technology shapes society (machines make history!), it is still the case that our tools reflect our image more than re-make it. This explains why McLuhan’s “global village” didn’t follow on the heels of global media. Was Al Qaeda really going to turn into a hippie commune when they got cell phones? No, they were going to get better at doing what they were already busy doing.

Reforming media technology may not be quite as futile as painting the deck chairs as the ship sinks. But it does need to be seen in a larger context. We live in a world so hostile to genuine personal relationships that most marriages end in divorce. Work is becoming all consuming as mobile information technologies penetrate home and family. Urbanization tends to magnify a sense of impersonal facelessness. Globalization is making stability a fond memory. The pace of life is frenetic. In short, as Illich noted, things are out of whack. Life has lost its balance. And for the most part, we simply pour this rabid, overwrought energy down your spiraling bowels. I guess I just couldn’t see how palling around with you—even if I am padding my profile with all the causes I “support”—will change the facts of modern life. Oh, and if I just want a momentary escape from those facts, I still have TV . . . sorry.