We are by now all familiar with this utopian/dystopian dialectic. Facebook is either going to democratize voice and action, and in doing so, save democracy itself or it is going to boost the narcissistic and the banal, and in doing so, destroy democracy (while saving cute cats the world over).
In his fascinating treatment of Facebook and democracy, José Marichal says not so fast. It is not either/or, but how, why, and when.
Marichal cuts into Facebook, simplifying it down to a platform consisting of “connections” and “disclosures.” Connections are mostly realized through Facebook’s facility to network friends. These friends are self-selected and research has shown mainly consist of intimate, strong-tie relations existing offline as well as online. Communication exists within this network of close connections and is conceptualized as such by the platform’s users.
These user communications are what Marichal labels as disclosures. His “architecture of disclosure” is Facebook’s purpose-built environment that systematically—and in some ways insidiously—encourages its users to not just disclose but to disclose increasingly personal revelatory data. This is an important aspect of Marichal’s argument and he takes the time to demonstrate some of the many ways Facebook has become the “perfect machine to get you to reveal intimate (if sometimes banal) details about yourself to others” (p. 33). Progressive disclosures become a way to perform at (and manage) ones very own identity.
Marichal notes how Facebook has perfected this architecture not with degraded voyeuristic interest; it is simply their business model. They capture and commodify a portfolio of these disclosures and sell them on to their advertisers. They have no prurient interest in your lunch choice today; they simply want to sell your roast beef selection on to some cold cut companies.
Marichal’s ontology, as with his overall arguments, are specific to Facebook and he is wise to make clear that social media platforms are not all the same; what is true for Facebook may not be true for Twitter.
So how does this all relate to the political? In some ways the two fundamental properties of Facebook discussed in the book reflect two dimensions of democracy. Disclosures are ways to define and develop the “freedom, choice, and activity” benefits of the private “actualized neoliberal citizen” (p 81). Meanwhile connections are the (putative) tools to attain the public benefits of the communitarian and collective. “Facebook’s power comes from merging these two strands of … utopianism by allowing people to attain the ‘public’ benefits of communitarian utopianism while preserving the ‘private’ individualism of liberal utopianism” (p. 19).
Marichal carefully builds up these arguments, demonstrating an admirable command of a wealth of scholarship from the information sciences, critical and post-structural theories, media and communication studies, and more. If there is a downside to this steady build-up, it is in its making for a buried lead, to wit, his arguments concerning when the architecture of disclosure may support democratic goals and where instead it might threaten them.
In neo-liberal democracies, Marichal argues, where the liberal consumerist self is already all-important, the architecture of disclosure adds little to the well-entrenched politics of identity. I can “like” any number of just political causes and my network of intimates will legitimate this political performance by “liking” it (and therefore me) back. The pitfall is that this political act, cast as an identity performance, risks an over personalization that will fail to connect to the “impersonal structural forces” (p. 14) that underpin any just political cause. I “like” the lone warrior combating inner city poverty but what I really need to do is act to confront the structural violence that entails that poverty.
In contrast, Marichal submits that in totalitarian states this same architecture of disclosure may actually liberate the self and allow for otherwise impossible break-through mobilizations: “While Facebook's encouragement of a ‘retreat to the personal’ might be a problem in Western democracies, it is exactly what's needed in totalitarian regimes where ‘problematizing the self’ might be an important corrective to regimes that do not regard ‘the self’ as important. The architecture of revelation might be a problem unique to liberal societies” (p. 126).
Yet I am not so sanguine. While liberating the self is no doubt fundamental in a non-liberal society, I am not convinced that the architecture of disclosure allows users to break through self-ingrained communitarian politics to actually arrive at a free self. Indeed, Facebook’s very connection of intimates may drive users not towards the self but instead back to communitarian identity. We hope that Facebook will liberate the self in order to ultimately allow for instrumental and policy-relevant action. But all too often it instead seems to encourage the user to further align with their communitarian order and its underlying (and often self-destructive) identity politics. I don’t properly react against those in political power that are failing to govern because I am a Christian from the South, or a Kikuyu not a Luo, or a Sunni not a Shia. Identity politics further trumps instrumental politics and the connections and disclosures of Facebook play right into that.
Now for a few nitpicks. The book is poorly edited to the point of distraction. Case in point: “Facebook is primarily a world fueled by which feelings and emotions” (p. 66). What? In one paragraph on page 125 I desired a follow-up on two of the citations; I then turned to the bibliography in the back only to discover both references absent.
Marichal routinely references a study he undertook of 250 politically oriented Facebook groups. While he calls upon the study when it suits his purpose, we are left mostly to speculate as to exactly the methods and overall results of the research. His most significant overview reads: “Throughout 2011, I conducted a content analysis of 250 politically oriented Facebook groups. Using Google Translate, I examined Facebook groups from 32 different countries in 23 different languages” (p 13). I am a stickler for methods so I wonder: What was his sampling approach, his coding method—what are the overall results? I am otherwise left to my darkest worry: that he has cherry picked from the study when it conveniences his argument and has otherwise ignored everything else.
The above notwithstanding, the good in Facebook Democracy far outweighs the bad and there is much to appreciate about this text. Additional sections of the book detail other fascinating ways that Facebook intersects with the political. For instance, Marichal gives a nice treatment of some aspects of the Arab Spring, there is a full chapter attending to privacy, and more.
Marichal helps us understand that Facebook relates to democracy in different ways and in different contexts due to definitive design decisions that this corporation has made in its own interest. If I am to remain at all optimistic, it is only that I believe Facebook need not be the social media platform for all people and all time. If the architecture of disclosure represents specific engineering choices made for specific corporate purpose, then why can’t we instead create “an architecture of democracy” that serves the public purpose? Facebook Democracy does not contemplate this architecture of democracy, let alone tell us how to design it. But it leaves me seeing no other choice but for citizens to collectively begin the processes of building one. The alternative is indeed a threat to public life.
