Facebook Democracy: The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life

200 Pages·2012·0.885 MB·English

by  José Marichal

Facebook Democracy
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Facebook Democracy
The architecture of Disclosure
and the Threat to Public Life
José marichaL
California Lutheran University, USA
© José marichal 2012
all rights reserved. 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.
José marichal has asserted his right under the copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
Published by
ashgate Publishing Limited ashgate Publishing company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
marichal, Jose.
Facebook democracy : the architecture of disclosure and the threat to public life.
1. Facebook (electronic resource) 2. online social networks–Political aspects. 3. Political
socialization–Technological innovations. 4. Political participation–Technological innovations.
i. Title
303.3’8’02856754-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
marichal, Jose.
Facebook democracy : the architecture of disclosure and the threat to public life / by Josi
marichalis.
p. cm. — (Politics & international relations)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isbN 978-1-4094-4430-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — isbN 978-1-4094-4431-2
(ebook) 1. Political participation--Technological innovations. 2.communication in politics—
Technological innovations. 3. Political participation—Data processing. 4. Facebook (Firm) 5.
Disclosure of information. 6. online social networks—Political aspects. i. Title.
JF799.m32 2012
323’.0402854678—dc23
2012002367
isbN 9781409444305 (hbk)
isbN 9781409444312 (ebk–pdf)
isbN 9781409461678 (ebk–ePUb)
Printed and bound in Great britain by the
mPG books Group, Uk.
Contents
Introduction: The Allure of Facebook 1
1 Facebook and the Utopian/Dystopian Dialectic 17
2 Facebook and the Architecture of Disclosure 33
3 Facebook and the Decline of the Public 59
4 The Personal Citizen 75
5 Engagement as Personal Citizens 89
6 The Digital Front Stage and Deliberation 101
7 Facebook and Mobilization: Beyond the Facebook Revolution 109
8 Privacy in the Age of Personal Politics 127
9 Friending the Nation-State: Social Networking and Power 139
10 Conclusions: How to Listen on Facebook 147
Bibliography 161
Index 189
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Introduction
The Allure of Facebook
It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the
encumbering thoughts of other people. I have, little by little, created a fog around
me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even
I. How can I know who I am, when I am all this? Little by little you must create
a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be
taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now
is that you’re too real. Your endeavors are too real; your moods are too real. Don’t
take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself.
Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s
The Teaching of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1991: 17)
In The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda retells an account of his
experience as a young US graduate student in anthropology who was interested
in learning more about the plants of the Yaqui Desert in Mexico. He encounters a
Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan who, rather than teach him about botany,
dispenses life lessons. One of his key admonishments to the young Castaneda is to
forget about plants and focus on “erasing his personal history.” Throughout their
hallucinogenic travels in the desert, Don Juan elaborates upon how to implement
his theory of erasure:
Begin with simple things, such as not revealing what you really do. What’s
wrong is that once people know you, you are an affair taken for granted and
from that moment on you won’t be able to break the tie of their thoughts … You
see, we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or
we don’t. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with
the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog
around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where
the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves. (Castaneda 1991: 15)
In the hyper-connected world of 2010, this advice seems absurd. Growing up in
an era where, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, teenagers
in the United States spend over seven hours a day engaged with some form of
information communication technology (ICTs), it would be inconceivable to these
kids that “eras(ing) your personal history” would be either viable or desirable
(Rideout et al. 2010). If ever such a point existed where we could “erase our
personal histories” and “create a fog around ourselves,” that time is long past.
2 Facebook Democracy
This is in no small part due to the advent of the Internet. The increase in
processor speeds and point-to-point networking technologies has flattened what
Giddens (1990) called time/space distanciation. This ability to connect with
anyone anywhere has changed how we relate to other human beings. Most of
us now live in a network society (Castells 2000) where our very identities are
defined by our relationship to this network. Indeed, for many young people that
have grown up in this network society, the salient question might be, “Do I have a
self that is distinct from my Internet self”?
In this book, I argue there is a social and political benefit to being able to
create “a fog around ourselves,” not just for the outside world, but for ourselves
as well. At the very least, our hyper-connected era makes it more difficult for us to
be contingent, doubtful or uncertain in our online/public presentations of self. In
addition, it makes it easier for us to retreat to our comfortable personal networks.
The popularity of social networking sites (SNS), particularly the popularity of
Facebook, makes it increasingly difficult to develop a contingent self that embraces
and exhibits doubt, flexibility and uncertainty about the world around us.
Facebook encourages us to lift this fog around ourselves through an
architecture of disclosure that compels us to provide more and more information
about ourselves. On one hand, this revelation may make connect us more to
those in our network, but it might also make us more rigid and fixed in our self-
construct. Taking “everything for sure and real,” is a formula for steadfastness and
determination. It is also a formula for rigidity and intransigence, the latter poses
serious problems for democratic societies.
The Social Networking Revolution
The network society (Castells 2000) remained largely theoretical until the
development of social networking sites. Friendster, MySpace and others allowed
individuals to organize themselves in ways not anticipated in the era of “one to
many,” mass media forms of communication. SNS sites allowed for sharing of
content within one or more communities of interest. Shared interests could then
be leveraged to co-produce content, a phenomenon Howe (2006) refers to as
crowdsourcing. Things as innocuous as co-created restaurant reviews or where
to find the cheapest version of a video game gave individual users a power they
heretofore lacked.
In this Web 2.0 era, the networked information economy (Benkler 2006)
empowered users to make better decisions by reducing information costs and
reducing barriers to collective action. Sites popped up all over the Web that
promised to improve a user’s quality of life. Wikipedia entries, while oft maligned
in academia, democratized the encyclopedia with only a marginal reduction in
information quality. Sites like e-Bay reduced information asymmetries that had
previously disadvantaged consumers in the market place. In the political arena,
Introduction 3
sites like YouTube allowed the sharing of political content in ways that reduced the
costs of accessing political information.
However, despite all of these benefits, the Web initially functioned largely an
external add-on to an individual’s offline world. It took the advent of SNS sites,
like Friendster and MySpace, to make an abstract online world of sharing with
“avatar- ed.” strangers meld with an individual’s offline world. Donath and Boyd’s
(2004) definition of SNS’s points to:
on-line environments in which people create a self-descriptive profile and
then make links to other people they know on the site, creating a
network of personal connections. Participants in social network sites are
usually identified by their real names and often include photographs; their
network of connections is displayed as an integral piece of their self-
presentation. (72)
The ability to do these three things – create profiles, build a network and grow that
network – allowed users to organize the Web around their offline relationships.
This innovation took the Web from an anonymous, fragmented environment to a
nomynous space (Zhao et al. 2008) where one’s persona was mediated through
a self-selected profile and their networks were organized around their offline
life. The growth of SNS sites has been explosive. In 2010, 43 percent of Internet
users in the United States reported using social networking sites “several times a
day,” a sizeable increase from 2009 where only 34 percent reported using social
networking at the same rate (Hampton et al. 2011). By contrast, a recent Pew
survey found that only 14 percent of teens blog, compared to 28 percent in 2006
(Lenhart et al. 2010).
Boyd and Ellison (2007) trace the beginning of social networking sites in 1997
with the launch of a site called sixdegrees.com. Social networking sites evolved
from the late 1990s – when SNSs existed primarily as groups around racial/ethnic
communities (for example, MiGente, Black Planet, and Asian Avenue) – to the
emergence of Friendster in the early 2000s, and then to an explosion of SNSs in
the mid 2000s, with MySpace as the leader of the pack. My Space, Facebook’s
predecessor, started as a mechanism for musicians to promote their work. It
quickly became “cool” and popular amongst US high school students throughout
the late 2000s (Boyd and Ellison 2007).
As with many technological innovations, high-school and college students in
the United States were among the first to adopt this technology en masse. Using
the proximity of college life, students used sites to reconnect with old friends and
to cultivate new relationships. In 2004, Harvard University undergraduate student
Mark Zuckerberg launched a social networking application for the university’s
students called “the Facebook.” Based on the tradition of printed college
“Facebooks” that were similar to yearbooks, “the Facebook” restricted entry to
those with a Harvard.edu address. Throughout 2004, Zuckerberg expanded the site