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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Facebook has fundamentally changed how the world connects. No other company has played a greater role in the history of social networking online. Yet Facebook is no longer simply a social networking site or social media platform. Facebook is Facebook. Taina Bucher shows how Facebook has become an idea of its own: something that cannot be fully described using broader categories. Facebook has become so commonplace that most people have a conception of what it is, yet it increasingly defies categorization. If we want to understand Facebook's power in contemporary society and culture, Bucher argues, we need to start by challenging our widespread conception of what Facebook is. Tracing the development and evolution of Facebook as a social networking site, platform, infrastructure and advertising company, she invites readers to consider Facebook anew. Contrary to the belief that nobody uses Facebook anymore, Facebook has never been more powerful. This timely book is important reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone seeking to understand the Facebook phenomenon.
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Seitenzahl: 428
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Facebook is Facebook
Facebook is Facebook
Feeling Facebook
Origin story
A guidebook to Facebook?
It’s complicated
Facebook is everything
Book outline
Notes
1 Metaphors at work: Framing Facebook
From town square to living room
Techno-utopianism and the open internet
Move fast and break things
Metaphors at work
Concluding remarks
Notes
2 Of electricity and chairs: Facebook as infrastructure
Electric light
Chairs
Concluding remarks
Notes
3 Grounded in reality: How Facebook programs sociality
How networks became social and online identity grounded in reality
Whose authenticity?
The big business of friendship
Communal aspects of friendship
Friendship as work
Facebook identity – what’s in a name?
Concluding remarks
Notes
4 Engineering a platform: Facebook’s techno-economic evolution
News Feed: Your personal newspaper
News journalism as the model
The algorithmic logic of Facebook
Building an empire, becoming a platform
Platform programmability
The mobile revolution
Concluding remarks
Notes
5 Monetizing You: Facebook’s advertising ecosystem
Monitoring and targeting YOU: The rise of behavioural advertising
Facebook, the ad company
Facebook ads from the advertiser’s perspective
Why users are shown specific ads
Concluding remarks
Notes
6 Personalized politics: Facebook’s profiling machinery
The politics of the political
Elections and political campaigns
Facebook’s central role in data-driven campaigning
Regimes of experimentation
Political advertising on Facebook
Platform governance and content moderation
The politics of the polluted information ecology
Haunted data: Cambridge Analytica and the inertia of infrastructure
Facebook in the wild: The case of dangerous speech in Myanmar
Concluding remarks
Notes
Conclusion: The many faces of Facebook
Facebook as a hyperobject
Becoming new
More-than-social media
Possibilities for the future
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
, 2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
, 2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
, 3rd edition
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
, 2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver,
Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy,
, 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
, 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
, 3rd edition
taina bucher
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Taina Bucher 2021
The right of Taina Bucher to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3516-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3517-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bucher, Taina, author.
Title: Facebook / Taina Bucher.
Description: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: Digital media and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “How Facebook came to be, how it works, and why it is more powerful than ever”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047168 (print) | LCCN 2020047169 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535163 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535170 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509535187 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Facebook (Electronic resource) | Online social networks. | Social networks--Computer network resources.
Classification: LCC HM743.F33 B83 2021 (print) | LCC HM743.F33 (ebook) | DDC 302.30285--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047168
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047169
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Acknowledgements
The writing of this book is hugely indebted to senior editor at Polity Press, Mary Savigar. If Mary hadn’t approached me at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in late 2017 to pitch this project to me, I would never have embarked on it in the first place. I never envisioned myself writing an entire book about Facebook. Like so many of my peers, I was already quite fed up with Facebook. What more was there to say, I thought? As it turned out, quite a lot. Once I distanced myself from thinking of Facebook as a social media platform or social network site only, entire swathes of infrastructural activities became apparent. Sometimes chance encounters that plant the right seeds can be quite life-changing, as my brief meeting with Mary demonstrates. Mary, thanks for thinking of me for this project and for allowing me to prove myself wrong: Facebook is an immensely fascinating phenomenon. It has been an absolute pleasure to write this book, keeping me company amid some happy and challenging life events as Facebook calls them: childbirth, change of jobs, moving countries, pandemic. Thank you to Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and the rest of the Polity Press team for guiding me through the editorial and production process.
Status update: Thank you to everyone who has either explicitly or implicitly contributed to developing the ideas in this book. Thank you: Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, my colleagues in the ‘Don’t take it personal’ project team, and the participants from the Media Aesthetics seminars at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, for reading drafts at various stages of completion and providing critical feedback. Your comments have greatly improved the final product. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers for their time and efforts in making this a better book. I am grateful to the many people I have met at conferences, workshops, and seminars, who have provided crucial insights into different aspects of Facebook. I am especially grateful to the informants from various NGOs and human rights organizations whose input and generosity helped to shape my understanding of Facebook. Thank you also to research assistant Louise Bechmann Ødegaard Jensen for her research in the early stages of book writing. This book benefited from financial support by the ‘Digitization and Diversity’ project funded by the Research Council of Norway. Thank you to project leader Anne-Britt Gran for granting the time and resources to work on this book as part of the project.
Finally, my immense gratitude goes to friends and family. You deserve so much more than a status update. Georg, your patience and support means everything. I dedicate this book to Alvar.
Introduction: Facebook is Facebook
Everybody has a Facebook story. Whether it is the story of how a relationship started, or ended, how people found long-lost loved ones, how they learned about the weddings, births and divorces of old friends and acquaintances, Facebook has played – and still does – an important part in people’s personal and professional lives. Facebook entered my own life during the autumn of 2006 when I was a graduate student in London. Online social networking sites were a relatively new phenomenon; my lecturers talked about this new phenomenon called Web 2.0, and MySpace was very much a thing. So, when someone in my university network sent me a Facebook invitation, I did not think twice about it and filled out the blank blueish template with some personal details and started to add friends. My school friends in London all became members around the same time that autumn, approximately two years after Facebook first launched its site for a select few American Ivy League networks. Having gone to secondary school in Oslo, Norway, my Norwegian friends had yet to discover Facebook, so I sent off a couple of email invitations. One of the first messages on my Facebook wall came from one of my best friends, saying: ‘Hi Taina! Now I’m here! I’ll test this one too … usually sites like these only last a week or two for me, but now I’ve added a few pics so let’s see how it goes.’ I guess the rest is history. Not only did the site prove its staying power for my friends and me, but it also turned out to do so for a staggering 2.7 billion people worldwide.
Fifteen years after Facebook first launched, an approximate one-third of the world’s population uses one of its apps on a monthly basis (including Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram), nearly half of Americans get their news from the Facebook feed, and four petabytes of data are generated through the site each day. Facebook has become one of the most important advertising venues ever to exist, which essentially makes it an advertising business at its core. With nearly every marketer using Facebook advertising, the company made $75 billion in revenue for the twelve months ending 30 June 2020, along with a market capitalization of $805 billion as of September 2020.1 These are not just impressive numbers but numbers with profound consequences. The fact that Facebook (and Google) essentially own the market for digital advertising means that other businesses whose business models depend on advertising, such as journalism, face huge problems. As every news executive I have talked to (in the Nordic region) seems to agree, the biggest competition to their respective brands and newspapers is not another newspaper, but Facebook and its powerful grip on the ad market. This is not just a commercial problem but something that has far-reaching consequences for journalism as a whole. Fewer revenues support fewer journalists, and fewer journalists and less time to do quality reporting ultimately means a loss of public-service journalism. Facebook’s power as a data-driven and programmatic advertisement platform has also become key to the ways in which politics plays out. While just a few years ago, scholars were mainly concerned with the creation of pages and profiles by election candidates, now we are beginning to see the complex ways in which Facebook’s advertising platform is used in political campaigning and what that might mean for election results, public discourse and the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
It may seem strange to begin a book on Facebook with two paragraphs describing the mundaneness of Facebook on the one hand, and the specific nature of Facebook as a data-driven ad company on the other. Yet, this is exactly what Facebook is all about: tensions and transitions. A Facebook ad released shortly after the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 usefully brings some of these tensions and transitions into view. Barely two weeks after Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US congressional lawmakers in April 2018, Facebook released its biggest ever brand marketing campaign under the tagline ‘Here Together’ (see also Chapter 1). Designed as a nostalgic field trip through Facebook’s connective potentials, the ad set out to remind people why they had signed up to Facebook in the first place, promising its users to do ‘more to keep you safe and protect your privacy so that we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place – Friends’. The ad tells a tale familiar to many Facebook users. A story that begins with friendship, develops into an expanded network of ‘friends and acquaintances’, reaches a point of conflict where too many ‘Friends’ make you participate less, or at the very least differently, and ends with a hope for a better future – whether this future includes Facebook or not. Beyond articulating a certain structure of feeling around the ways in which Facebook has changed from a simple friendship site to something much bigger, the ad reiterates another familiar story about Facebook. This is the idea of Facebook as a social medium. In calling for change, Facebook remains firm in positioning itself as a place for friends. Yet, as I will argue in this book, this tale no longer holds true, if it ever did.
Facebook is Facebook
The core argument of the book is that Facebook cannot adequately be understood as a social medium, nor is it another name for the internet, as some would claim. Facebook is Facebook. While this may seem like a tautological statement at first, I want to suggest that, far from being useless, claiming that Facebook is irreducible to something else might be more generative than many of the metaphors currently in use to make sense of Facebook. The fact that Facebook is Facebook speaks not just to its global corporate power but, more profoundly, to Facebook becoming a concept of sorts. Much scholarly, public and corporate discourse tends to talk about Facebook in metaphorical and (sub)categorical terms. In the company’s early days, it seemed relatively uncontroversial simply to frame Facebook as belonging to the category of social media or social network site. More recently it has become more common to frame Facebook as a platform or infrastructure. Multiple metaphors abound to help us grasp this thing called Facebook, some of which we will explore in this book. As the company grew bigger, its definitional boundaries exploded. What the many definitions and conceptions of Facebook in newspaper articles, lawsuits, congressional hearings, scholarly papers and company press reports suggest is that there seems to be a growing need for clarification as to what Facebook really is. The ontological question is not just interesting for philosophical and theoretical reasons, but serves a very practical and political purpose. In a world where Facebook and its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, exercise unprecedented power and the conversation on regulation has gained a new urgency, we might have to come to terms with the notion that Facebook cannot readily be compared to something else but must be taken for what it is – Facebook.
What does suggesting that Facebook is Facebook and entertaining the idea of Facebook as a concept involve? The answer to this question begins from another, a question that I am sure many readers have already asked themselves: ‘Why do we need a book on Facebook at this point, fifteen or more years after it first launched?’ Or, as one well-meaning colleague put it, ‘aren’t you afraid that a book on Facebook is going to be a bit dated at this point?’ If we think of Facebook as primarily a social network site, there might indeed be something to my colleague’s question. But, as I want to suggest, this would be a very specific and frankly outdated way of understanding Facebook. If you think Facebook is not for you, that it has lost its cool, or doesn’t affect how you live your life, think again. Facebook is no longer, if it ever was, just a social network site. It’s a global operating system and a serious political, economic and cultural power broker. The Facebook that certain people, especially in the West, got accustomed to and signed up for more than a decade ago is far from the Facebook of today. There are many dimensions to this. One obvious point would be to say that Facebook is a work in progress. From its mission statements to its user base, technology, underlying code and design, Facebook is always changing. Along with the changing interfaces, functions and underlying system, our conceptions of what Facebook is have changed as well. If we were to go back in time, say to the beginning of the 2010s, much scholarly research on Facebook centred around questions of self-presentation, effects on self-esteem and well-being, personality traits of users, motivations for use, social capital and networking practices. In articles published at that time, Facebook was commonly considered a specific instance or subset of the broader category of social network site (SNS). Then, the label ‘social network site’ somehow lost its resonance along the way, only to be replaced by other broad categories and classification systems such as social media and platform.2
Many of the people who claim that Facebook has become insignificant or uninteresting say so because they still think of Facebook as primarily a social network site or social medium, whatever that means. Let us think of it as one of the particularly prevailing myths about Facebook. There are many more. Some myths, such as the myth of Facebook in decline and the myth of Facebook as primarily a social medium, overlap. This is not to say that Facebook isn’t declining, or that it hasn’t lost its cool. To some users, Facebook has certainly lost its appeal. A Pew study on teens’ use of social media and technology, for example, showed that while 71% of US teens reported using Facebook in 2014–15, the numbers had declined to 51% in 2018 (Anderson and Jiang, 2018). Reports from the Scandinavian countries show a similar tendency among the younger generations. In Norway, for example, 81% of people aged 15 to 25 reported using Facebook on a daily basis in 2019, a decline of 12 percentage points from two years prior (Kantar, Forbruker and Media). Reports of shrinking user numbers notwithstanding, revenue and profit continue to rise. The earnings report of the first quarter 2020 showed a 17% revenue growth, which is considerable taken the onset of a global pandemic into account (Facebook, 2020a). In other words, despite numerous campaigns that have urged people to leave and quit Facebook, business has never been better.
Insignificance, then, is a highly relative term. While the main service, Facebook.com, might have become less important as a communication channel among Western elites and younger generations, Facebook is important in many other ways – even among the very people who feature in the headlines on Facebook’s apparent demise. As Sujon et al. found in a longitudinal study on Facebook use, it is not so much that Facebook has become meaningless to young people, but rather that its meaning has changed. While in 2013, users reported using Facebook mostly to connect with others, five years later the same respondents reported using Facebook mainly as a ‘personal service platform’ for coordinating events, archiving photos and for relationship maintenance (Sujon et al., 2018). In other words, teenagers still use Facebook, just not necessarily in the same ways that they used to, or in the way that their parents use Facebook for that matter. In a WIRED magazine story commemorating Facebook’s fifteenth anniversary, teenagers reported mostly using Facebook for controlling what their parents post. Under the headline ‘Teens Don’t Use Facebook, But They Can’t Escape It Either’, one of the teenagers explained that Facebook had just always been there, both in terms of playing an essential part in family life, and also in a more abstract sense as a felt presence: ‘Even before Jace could understand the concept of Facebook, he felt its influence every time his dad had him stop what he was doing and pose for photos that were destined to be shared online’ (Dreyfuss, 2019a). This notion of concept and felt presence is important and one of the reasons why Facebook cannot be easily dismissed.
Feeling Facebook
Invoking the feeling of Facebook, of its felt presence, confronts its alleged status as a social network site, social medium or platform. The memory of having to pose for your parents’ Facebook-friendly photos, or, as one of the speakers at an arts festival told the audience, the experience of ‘not being able to visit a new city without searching for the perfect new vertical cover photo for Facebook’, suggests that the question of what Facebook is and why it matters cannot be answered adequately by referring back to other high-order labels. The way in which Facebook touches the lives of so many, whether this touching is barely noticed or significantly sensed, attests to its atmospheric force. This book suggests that one of the ways in which we might understand Facebook is through notions of atmosphere, affect and imaginaries. More colloquially, atmosphere is used to describe the ambiance or feel of a place.
Scholars in human geography have taken up the term from Gernot Böhme’s writings on aesthetics (1993) as a way of theorizing the unique backdrop of everyday life (Anderson, 2009). According to Bille et al., atmospheres refer to the ‘spatial experience of being attuned in and through the material world’ (2015: 35). It’s a feeling of in-betweenness that cannot readily be attributed to either an object or subject, but needs to be thought of as something that emerges in an encounter between people and things and seems to fill a space with a certain tone or mood. What Jace is describing when he recounts growing up and posing for Facebook photos is essentially the experience of being attuned in certain ways rather than others. If, for Böhme (1993), atmospheres are about the perceived presence of something and their reality in space, we might think of Jace’s experience of growing up as a way of feeling the atmospheric force of Facebook. Stopping what he was doing in order to pose for his dad’s Facebook photo also became a way of being attuned to the meaning of family and a certain way of staging what a happy family life looks like.
Jace’s story is not unique. Most of us have felt the presence of Facebook in one way or another. There are the ways in which we dance and have fun in front of the camera in case it gets posted on Facebook as evidence of a good time, the strategic status updating to boost the sense of personal success, or the way in which we make sure others know that we voted. If we include Instagram, the Facebook-owned image-sharing app, many more examples come to mind. The felt presence of Facebook as a ‘family of apps’, consisting of Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, can be seen in the ways that restaurants make dishes appear ‘Instagram-worthy’ or the ways in families coordinate their daily routines and communicate in smaller groups using WhatsApp or Messenger. Bille et al. (2015) describe how architects and designers work to stage atmospheres, by intentionally shaping spaces for certain emotional responses. While the authors mainly have physical buildings in mind, Facebook, too, should be seen as a designed space that seeks to affect people’s moods and guide their behaviour for utilitarian and commercial purposes.
Beyond the pre-individual scales of measure, or intensities, that are often taken to be at the heart of how affect is theorized (Clough, 2008), the notion of feeling Facebook is very much part of the articulable realm. When people feel the presence of Facebook in their lives, it is not necessarily beyond discourse and conscious representation, as certain strands of affect theory would have it (Massumi, 1995). While the force of Facebook may be difficult to articulate, in terms of pointing to what exactly it is about Facebook that spurs a specific sensation or emotion, there is no denying the fact that Facebook means a lot to individuals, organizations and institutions alike. The presence of Facebook is felt everywhere, whether it is in the very real sense of threatening the livelihood and condition of an entire institution, such as journalism and the news industry, or more subtly as in the ways in which the health sector has to grapple with Facebook as an alternative information-seeking forum for patients. From the perspective of other businesses and organizations, Facebook means affected revenue streams, changing workflows, new job titles, opportunities for organizing protests, breaking and redefining news, a new political platform and regulatory challenges.
Far from being insignificant, then, Facebook matters. It matters because Facebook orients people. Following cultural theorist Sara Ahmed, we might say that Facebook’s power has to do with such orientations. ‘Orientations matter,’ Ahmed writes, because they ‘shape how the world coheres’ (Ahmed, 2010: 235). While Ahmed specifically speaks about being oriented in the world from the perspective of ‘queer phenomenology’ and the ways in which the world coheres around certain bodies rather than others, we might think about Facebook in similar ways. We are oriented towards Facebook, whether we like it or not, and Facebook is oriented towards us. Take Jace, from the WIRED feature: he might not use Facebook personally, but it still orients his family’s life and the way in which family life is performed. Moreover, my well-meaning colleague might think Facebook has lost its cool, but that does not take away the fact that to many people and organizations, coolness is not even an issue. Talk to the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper that has lost its advertising money to Facebook, and they will not care whether Facebook shows a slight decline in active monthly users among the younger generations. All they will probably care about is their newspaper, the journalists and what it means for the future of journalism. Or talk to a Rohingya refugee whose life has been threatened by the atrocities in Myanmar following the spread of propaganda on Facebook by Buddhist ultranationalists. I am sure their Facebook story will provide an answer to why Facebook matters.
An orientation approach asks us to attend to the ways in which the object of analysis affects ‘what is proximate’ and ‘what can be reached’ (Ahmed, 2006: 3). What matters in how ‘we come to find our way in the world’ (Ahmed, 2006: 1), however, is not always a given. As Ahmed writes, ‘depending on which way we turn’, the world may take on new shapes and meanings. The question is what makes us turn one way or the other in the first place? In this book, I suggest that Facebook constitutes one particularly powerful orientation device, in that it shapes ‘“who” or “what” we direct our energy and attention toward’ (Ahmed, 2006: 3). This holds true whether we think of Facebook’s algorithms and platform design directing people’s attention, its de facto role as a dominant news source, or its persistent position as a centre of attention in policy circles, electoral politics and surveillance capitalism. True, even the slightest sound, strange smell, or unexpected touch can make us turn, but nothing seems quite as disorienting and commanding of our attention in the algorithmic media environment as Facebook. When things orient, they take up space, they make an impression, render other things more or less probable, provide a path for further direction, suggest what is important, put in place. As we will see throughout this book, this is exactly what Facebook does. Importantly, as a global orientation device of massive scale, Facebook does not merely take up space. It also shapes it in fundamental ways.
Origin story
Facebook has become so deeply engrained into culture and society that the company’s origin story as a college network for the few and privileged, programmed by former Harvard student and dropout Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his friends, is well known. The founding myth tells the story of a 2003 date night gone bad. Bitter and frustrated, young Zuckerberg decides to create a juvenile ‘hot-or-not’ site called FaceMash, which asked fellow Harvard students to compare their female classmates and judge their relative attractiveness. Zuckerberg hacked into the websites of nine Harvard houses to gather the photos of the women. He then wrote the code to compute rankings for every vote received. Thirteen weeks after the creation of FaceMash, and after almost having been expelled from Harvard University as a result, Facebook launched as a Harvard-only social network in February 2004.
In an early interview with the American news channel CNBC, Zuckerberg described Facebook as:
An online directory that connects people through universities and colleges through their social networks there. You sign on. You make a profile about yourself by answering some questions, entering some information such as your […] contact information […] and, most importantly, who your friends are. And then you can browse around and see who people’s friends are and just check out people’s online identities and see how people portray themselves and just find some interesting information about people. (CNBC, 2004)
In subsequent interviews, Zuckerberg has reiterated these humble beginnings, stressing the fact that all he wanted was simply to connect his school. ‘We were just building this thing because we thought it was awesome’, Zuckerberg said in a 2011 interview to aspiring entrepreneurs at the Startup School. In a grandiose gesture of ‘bringing the world closer together’, Zuckerberg spoke at the first Facebook Community Summit in 2017: ‘I always thought one day someone would connect the whole world, but I never thought it would be us. I would have settled for connecting my whole dorm’ (Zuckerberg, 2017a). Zuckerberg’s origin story frames Facebook almost as an accident. He never even intended for Facebook to be a company, he claimed, it just happened (Zuckerberg, 2011a). The first attempts at setting up the company were ‘a disaster’. As the inexperienced college freshmen they were, Facebook was initially set up in Florida because one of the co-founders ‘happened to live’ there at the time. Even moving to Silicon Valley didn’t seem like much of a thought-out plan. Zuckerberg and his friends didn’t want to stay in Boston over the summer, so they went to Silicon Valley because it seemed like a ‘magical place’ for start-ups. After a year of working from their five-bed Palo Alto home, Zuckerberg and his friends finally moved to a real office in 2005. Zuckerberg seals the start-up narrative by casting himself in the role of the dedicated and nerdy software programmer. All he ever looked forward to when growing up, Zuckerberg said in a 2010 interview, was to write software after school.
Mark Zuckerberg and his company have come a long way from the nerdy college beginnings. These early stories are not just fraught with myths about the passionate hacker, free from commercial motivations. Narratives like these have helped to strategically build the story of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg as a hero of geek power. As Alice Marwick shows in her ethnography of the Silicon Valley start-up scene at the end of the 2000s, Mark Zuckerberg quickly became the epitome of the next-generation tech entrepreneur, founder and millionaire. His genius status was further cemented by extensive media coverage, conference appearances, and endless references in blogs and magazines, essentially creating a sense of celebrity that propelled people’s interest in the Zuck as a meritocratic myth (Marwick, 2013). Roughly fifteen years later, countless personal portraits have been written about the Zuck: he’s been named TIME ‘Person of the Year’ 2010, and the biographical drama The Social Network is probably the only film about a nerdy CEO of an internet start-up that has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. Yet, Zuckerberg’s journey as the CEO of one of the world’s biggest software companies is not just a happy tale. At least since the 2016 US election, with all its emphasis on fake news and Russian interference, Zuckerberg has evolved from a cultural hero for the start-up generation to something of a global privacy villain. Although Facebook had been involved in many scandals prior to that – in fact, the company is famous for its many privacy scandals – it wasn’t until around 2016 that Facebook started to look bigger, more powerful and more dangerous.
Originally, Facebook was merely a website that displayed individual profiles. In 2006, its most prevalent feature, the News Feed, was introduced. That same year, Facebook launched the first version of the Facebook API, ‘enabling users to share their information with the third-party websites and applications they choose’ (Morin, 2008). In 2007, Facebook released Facebook Platform, a set of tools and products for developers to make and adapt applications for the Facebook ecosystem. Launched at f8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, Zuckerberg called on developers ‘to build the next generation of applications with deep integration into Facebook’ (Facebook, 2007a). Facebook Platform was presented as a win-win situation and a new business opportunity for developers (and Facebook). Zuckerberg explained how developers would be able to build their businesses by getting distribution of their apps through ‘the social graph’, a term he has consistently used to describe people’s real-life connections, including friendships, business connections and acquaintances. Users, for their part, would benefit from new choices available to them through Facebook.
Also, in 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Ads. According to the company’s statement, the new ad system would allow ‘businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they want’ (Facebook, 2007b). For advertisers, Facebook Ads enabled them to create branded pages, run targeted ads and have access to the data pertaining to Facebook’s millions of users. Alongside Facebook Ads, two products were launched: Beacon, which caused the company’s first major privacy outcry, and Marketplace, which is still in use to this day. While critics doubted that users would be adding Cola as their friend, Zuckerberg’s vision for social advertising proved bigger, and more cynical. ‘People influence people’, he said, so by combining the social actions of friends with an advertiser’s message, ‘advertisers could deliver more tailored and relevant ads’ (the ad system will be discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 5).
In 2008, Facebook Connect was launched; an updated version of the Platform product, which allowed ‘users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site’ (Morin, 2008). Instead of having to register anew when signing in on a new Web service or app, Facebook Connect allowed users to log in using their Facebook identity. The Facebook-enabled one-click login system not only removed barriers for users to access new sites, but importantly, for those websites to access users’ Facebook profile information (Facebook, 2008). Moreover, as the company put it, Facebook Connect would allow developers to add ‘social context’ to their sites by showing users which friends had already made accounts and to ‘share content and actions taken on a third-party site with friends back on Facebook’ (ibid.).
Facebook’s perhaps most iconic feature, the ‘Like’ button, was introduced in 2009 and became an important game-changer in the business. In a thread on the question-and-answer platform Quora, one of Facebook’s most prolific engineers, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, recounts how the Like button first started off as ‘the awesome button’ (2014). Bosworth writes how he and others conceived of the button at a hackathon in July 2007, and how the project immediately gathered interest among different product teams at Facebook. While everyone at Facebook seemed to love the idea, to Bosworth’s great surprise, the Like button did not get the positive feedback from Mark Zuckerberg that he had hoped for, and so it remained a ‘cursed’ project until February 2009 when it was finally launched to the public. As with all publicly available accounts told by company insiders, statements like these need to be treated with a pinch of salt. This is important to keep in mind, as I will refer to such PR speak from time to time throughout the book, but will not always reiterate this analytical caveat. In the case of the Like button and the meticulous timeline that Bosworth (2014) provides in the Quora thread, we also need to bear in mind how it conveniently places the invention of the button before FriendFeed’s Like button, which Facebook was accused of copying at the time.
If everybody has a Facebook story, so do Facebook’s own employees and spokespersons. The stories told by so-called insiders – employees, former employees, collaborators, partners, tech journalists etc. – raise questions about their validity and reliability. It might be tempting to treat insider accounts as being of higher order and somehow more truthful. Yet, we must be reminded that insider accounts are stories too, accounts that are fraught with their own methodological and interpretative challenges (Cunliffe, 2010; Herod, 1999). Public claims made by Facebook employees and other insiders are often characterized by the discourse of public relations, which usually aims to portray the company in a favourable manner (Bhatia, 2010). That said, I will not critically scrutinize the truth value of every public Facebook statement or other insider account referenced in this book. This does not mean, however, that we can take their claims at face value. Corporate speech is a discursive construction; it both ‘reflects and shapes a social order’ (Hoffmann et al., 2018: 201). As with any other form of narrative and storytelling, Facebook’s press releases, blog posts, corporate presentations, public speeches, revenue reports and anecdotes, are performative. Consider, for example, how Leah Pearlman, then product manager at Facebook, and part of the team that developed the awesome button, announced the launch of the button in a blog post:
This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new ‘Like’ feature to be the stars, and the comments to be the review. (Pearlman, 2009)
In an attempt to frame the new Like button as a service to Facebook’s users, Pearlman strategically describes it as an overly positive metric. Of course, as has been raised time and again since, there was never an option to dislike, which would be the equivalent of being able to give a restaurant a one-star rating. While the concept of rating and numbering is hugely controversial (Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Esposito and Stark, 2019), it would be safe to say that the ability to hand out a five-star rating is worth nothing without the ability to also hand out a one-star rating. Yet, as Esposito and Stark remind us, ratings never mirror reality but need to be seen as second-order observations. Ratings function not to ‘inform us about how things are but because they provide an orientation about what others observe’ (2019: 3). Herein also lies the value for Facebook. Providing a Like button was not about mirroring reality but about orientation, creating a positive feedback mechanism that essentially circulates value to advertisers. The discursive construction and the use of metaphor in Perlman’s official announcement of the Like button is ultimately about corporate storytelling. Not only is Pearlman’s analogy wrong, but the ex-Facebook employee later professed regret for having played a role in creating one of the most addictive feedback loops in the advertising economy (Lewis, 2017; Karppi and Nieborg, 2020). Comparable to a five-star rating, the Like button isn’t like the restaurant rating on a reviews site. What Pearlman, Bosworth and the others conceived of back then is more akin to the reviews one would find in a travel guidebook. The whole idea behind guidebooks is to provide a selection of the best tips – or have you ever travelled to a new city with a guidebook full of mediocre suggestions?
A guidebook to Facebook?
Let’s stay with the guidebook metaphor a while longer. If the Like button laid the foundation for a carefully engineered attention economy centred on advertising, where is the guidebook for? Put differently, if we were to imagine Facebook as a geographical destination, where, in the travel book section, would we find its guidebook? Would it be like a city, or a state? Would Facebook even warrant a whole continent? And if we were to imagine a guidebook to the internet, where would Facebook be located? Would it be a website with a dedicated URL, under the apps section, a protocol or something else entirely? Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018) calls Facebook the greatest contender for becoming the operating system of our lives. The repercussions of this are much greater than competing for people’s laptops or mobile devices. Acting as the operating system of people’s lives means having the power to ‘measure our activities and states of being and constantly guide our decisions’ (p. 99). As Vaidhyanathan contends, Facebook is:
[t]he most influential media company in the world. It shapes the messages that politicians, dictators, companies, religions and more than two billion people wish to send in the world. It increasingly serves us news content, or content that purports to be news. It is the most powerful and successful advertising system in the history of the world. It’s increasingly the medium of choice for political propaganda. (2018: 101)
Government officials, the news media and scholars alike, have used all kinds of spatial metaphors to reckon with Facebook’s global power. Perhaps the most prevalent spatial metaphor has been to think of Facebook as a town square (Tussey, 2014). Whereas media and communication scholars have debated the public/private nature of Facebook since the very beginning, pointing to its porous and malleable boundaries, Zuckerberg has consistently framed Facebook as a public space. In an open letter describing a more privacy-focused vision of social networking, Zuckerberg (2019a) claims that Facebook and Instagram for the past fifteen years have served as the ‘digital equivalent of a town square’ (see also next chapter). The idea of Facebook as a digital town square is far from just empty company rhetoric. In Packingham vs North Carolina, the Supreme Court spoke forcefully about social media like Facebook as being vital for ‘speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge’ (Livni, 2017). In June 2017, the court unanimously overturned a North Carolina law that prohibited registered sex offenders from accessing social media for being unconstitutional. While the town square metaphor helps to illuminate Facebook’s role in accessing information and communicating with one another, the metaphor may give the wrong impression as to the nature of speech on privately owned platforms. As Ethan Zuckerman writes, ‘speech on these platforms is less like holding a rally in a public park – it’s more like giving a speech in a shopping mall […] where private actors have a great deal of control over speech that takes place on their property’ (2014: 152). The town square metaphor may also not be very suitable for making sense of the global reach and scale of Facebook. Besides, town squares generally don’t warrant guidebooks.
Nations, however, are great candidates for guidebooks. Indeed, Facebook is routinely described as a country. It is not too uncommon to read things like ‘if Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world’, or to hear Mark Zuckerberg being referred to as the head of the Facebook nation. While careful to not frame itself explicitly as a nation (with all that this entails), the metaphor has been used in several of Facebook’s public-facing ad campaigns as a way of describing how nations are like Facebook. In a cinematic ad entitled ‘The Things That Connect Us’ from 2012, the voice-over lists all the things that are just like Facebook, including ‘great nations’, because it ‘is something people build, so that they can have a place where they belong’ (more on this ad in Chapter 2).
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to frame himself and Facebook as a global do-gooder and democratic force. In a longer piece about Facebook’s mission to build a global community, Zuckerberg (2017a) puts Facebook firmly in the democratic driving seat. Zuckerberg notes how Facebook’s mission is to develop social infrastructure for a community – ‘for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all’. Whether it is about developing new drone, satellite or laser technologies to build the next-generation broadband infrastructure, or disaster relief funds and safety check functionalities, Facebook’s social services and infrastructure projects are often framed in terms of a humanitarian and democratic effort. For example, in 2013 when launching Internet.org, a consortium between Facebook, mobile handset makers, a browser company (Opera) and network infrastructure manufacturers, Zuckerberg basically outlined a techno-political vision for addressing economic disparities by means of internet connectivity.
Zuckerberg does not merely invoke global politics in public discourse about Facebook. He is also more directly involved in domestic and foreign politics. He is, for example, the co-founder of the political lobby organization fwd.us, a bipartisan immigration reform advocacy group who are pressing for immigrant rights. If Zuckerberg’s framing of immigrants as ‘dreamers’ and Silicon Valley as ‘an idealistic place’ is not exemplary of political rhetoric, then what is?
Despite Facebook’s attempts to define itself as a social infrastructure and community builder, ‘Zuckerberg is careful to avoid indicating that the site is anything more than a simple tool’ (Rider and Murakami, 2019: 646). Against the allegation of filter bubbles or fake news, for example, Zuckerberg has consistently framed Facebook as a facilitator and conduit of information rather than a gatekeeper or publisher. When Zuckerberg had to testify in front of congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in spring 2018, he explicitly told them that Facebook is not a media company. ‘I consider us to be a technology company’, Zuckerberg said, ‘because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build product and services for other people’ (Castillo, 2018). So, in Zuckerberg’s terms, having a workforce made up primarily of coders, makes Facebook a tech company. In addition, Rider and Murakami (2019) note how Zuckerberg draws consistently on the idea of Facebook as a facilitator by hosting networks. Accordingly, when pressed for answers on the spreading of mis- and disinformation, for example, Zuckerberg is quick to point out that it is people’s networks, not Facebook, that show us content. When drawing on the network metaphor for an explanation, Zuckerberg is clearly leaning on the myth of the internet as a stateless, democratic force that knows and shows no boundaries. The idea of the internet as a stateless cyberspace is not well founded. We know from the body of literature on internet governance and internet infrastructure (Mueller, 2010; DeNardis, 2014) that the internet knows and obeys state boundaries. The locality of the internet matters. Although largely regulated through multi-stakeholder groups and global organizations, the internet is both a very physical and political entity that is not just controlled by state actors but looks and feels different in different geographical locations.
Where does this selective and strategic differential framing of Facebook as either a town or nation leave us in terms of locating Facebook? If Facebook’s locality depends on who and when you ask, what, then, is the guidebook for? Put differently, what territory is being mapped out? Rather than thinking of Facebook in terms of fixed spatial metaphors such as squares, cities or states, the notion of topology offers a language for articulating the instabilities and fluctuations characteristic of malleable and changing entities such as Facebook. In its mathematical origin, topology is concerned with the theorem of the continuum, of how the properties of objects are preserved under continuous deformations (Lury et al., 2012). In contrast to ‘“Euclidean” space with its familiar geometry of stable, singular entities positioned against the external backdrop of a static space and linear time’, a topological approach accentuates how the infinite and differential character of relations has the capacity to generate its own ‘space-time, with its particular scales, extension and rhythms’ (Marres, 2012: 292). Whereas Cartesian coordinates enable us to measure a certain space, topology is not concerned with size and measurement as such but with the ways in which ‘relationships between various points/agents enact a space themselves’ (Decuypere and Simons, 2016: 374). A topological approach, especially as it has been adopted within the social sciences and the humanities, sees space and time not as a priori but as something produced by ‘entities-in-relation’ (Marres, 2012: 289). The primary analytic category is relationality, where change is not an exception but fundamental to how spaces are configured.
