Leonardo

According to Roberto Simanowski, the author of Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves, this volume isn't a book about Facebook. Rather his concern is what he calls Facebook society. His starting point is Facebook's claim that it is building a "global community," and his underlying assumption is that social media platforms have altered social interaction, political life and outlooks on the world, even for people who do not regularly use them. Bringing boundless enthusiasm to how Facebook and other social apps create community, this cultural studies perspective both celebrates networked society and offers a critique of problematic elements derived from digital communities, with a particular focus on our concept of the self.

Simanowski articulates a number of rationales for why people get involved in these communities within a world where people are frequently immersed in their multiple devices. His driving idea is that it is too late to dismiss Facebook as a fraud even if Facebook society is a society of immediacy, impatience and immersion. This brings him to ask why and how Facebook persuades its users to publicize their private lives. He concludes that there are several answers: It is cool, it offers the feeling of being a public person, one can communicate with minimal interaction, one can engage with different groups on different themes, and users can gain a broad sense of being connected to many communities. Nonetheless, as he explains,

we need to understand Facebook as the answer to a problem that perturbs the (post)modern subject more or less consciously. It must be understood as the symptom of a cultural evolution that should be thought through the lens of a philosophy of history and should not be too quickly reduced to scenarios of political oppression or economic exploitation. The political-economic consequences of the Facebook system lie deeper. For one thing, through the accumulation and analysis of personal data, Facebook generates knowledge as a tool of domination; in this way, it advances the process of commercialization. For another thing, through its invitation to a kind of experience of the self that is reflexively impoverished, it produces the very subjects who are no longer dismayed by this process

(p. xiv).

Despite the mention of commercialization, Simanowski is more focused on how social tools remake our self-image, emphasizing social networks and diary apps. He frames this in a number of ways. First, he sees sharing on Facebook as a stopgap that gives us a decent option for delegating our own experiences to others. He also claims that self-representation on Facebook happens less in a way that is narratively reflective than as a spontaneously episodic and documentary event. One outcome is that the autobiographic narrative Facebook produces as one engages is essentially a narrative in which the authority is the network's algorithms. Simanowski characterizes this type of self-image narrative as pointillist, postmodern and posthuman. Finally, he claims that information management on Facebook and on the Internet suppresses collective memory. A point that comes up often is how our new "tools" encourage users to engage in more or less unconscious and unreflective self-narration, a modality that favors implicit over explicit self-revelation. The medium is the message!

This type of behavior, we learn, prefers mechanical presentation, via photography or automated sharing, to mindful representations via textual statements and narrative structure. Because exchange is spontaneous, episodic and documentary, [End Page 221] it is typically not characterized as deliberate and coherent. Similarly, what the author calls an automatic autobiography or posthuman self-description is not a form in which the subject is authoring their own story. Instead, given the technology, the actual narrators are the network and its algorithms. This works well for a company (Facebook) whose only product is the data it collects to sell to others.

Admittedly, I found the book a somewhat bumpy ride. While the excursions into cultural history were excellent, the litany of...