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CHAPTER ONE

You are Becoming your Facebook Profile or, Abstractification by Facebook

You are becoming your Facebook profile. It started off as harmless, albeit peculiar, event where you were asked to fit your personality—who you are—into the template provided by Facebook. This fitting procedure required that you subtract large portions of yourself in order for there to be enough room. You have subsequently grown accustomed to this reduced-format “you.” As you have grown and changed in life, so too does your Facebook personality change because your experiences have been used to inform your profile. You have even found the ability to experience life, albeit narrowly, through the social world mediated by Facebook. I will argue that, over time, this process has reversed. Rather than taking the concrete experiences of your existence and abstracting them into your Facebook profile, it is now your abstract Facebook profile that has restricted your concrete life experiences! Following Fromm (1990), I have chosen to call this procedure “abstractification.”

Abstractification begins with a basic abstraction—kind of like how a tree you can draw in five seconds symbolizes tree, but doesn’t really represent any real tree. The five-second sketch “tree” saves time when trying to draw or describe a tree—“you know, a brown trunk that is perpendicular to a grassy setting with a green, symmetrical ball of leaves at the top.” Such a tree isn’t growing outside your apartment, but you don’t have time or patience to describe it in detail. With the abstract tree, there is no problem. The problem arises with abstractification. Abstractification occurs when the abstraction becomes more real when talking about trees than the living tree that’s growing next to the sidewalk. You might look at the tree and think “well that’s not a tree, because it’s not a brown trunk with a green bunch of leaves.”

My argument here is that social media, of which Facebook is the most contemporary and popular example, is responsible for the abstractification of its users. This means that its users—each a unique and singular person, have become increasingly generic; that is, they have become abstractions of themselves. Facebook has facilitated this in three ways: first, users must necessarily fit themselves into pre-determined, generic personality categories in the construction of their profile; second, by using Facebook to engage with others socially, users must necessarily identify with and through their abstracted personality—that is, their profile; and third, the implementation of technology—for example, the camera—has increased the number of intersections between Facebook’s virtual-reality and the life-world (it is in the latter where unique individuals come into direct contact with one another). While it has not yet been specifically stated, my argument here is that abstractification is not a good thing. In its use here, it may be understood as a loss of individuality—that which makes a person unique.

Recall the experience of creating your original Facebook profile. It may be difficult to think back before your virtual doppelganger came into being, but imagine that you are creating one for the first time. As you begin to answer each of the questions, you consider which answer best represents you. That is, among the available options, which abstraction most resembles you? Jaron Lanier (2009), the father of virtual reality, explains the ubiquity of this task. “Personal reductionism [or abstraction] has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in reductive ways when you file a tax return” (p. 48). There is little misunderstanding that one is one’s tax-return-identity. One’s tax-return-identity is a fiscal abstraction of a person that is useful for organizing and understanding one’s fiscal affairs. It used to be the ongoing joke that governmental agencies cared little about the individual person, preferring instead to consider them in terms of their social security numbers and gross income. This was funny because it had once been strange to think of oneself as nothing but a number in a machine, but since it has now become customary to identify with one’s earnings, this joke is seldom told.

So anyway, you’re designing your Facebook profile for the first time, and you come to the following question: “Occupation/School.” For the sake of simplicity, imagine that you are me when I first started writing this: a graduate student at the University of West Georgia (UWG). I type that in. Incidentally, I discover that the dual title is appropriate since the school that I attend also signs my checks as my employer. But there is no space to provide that interesting detail. I am, however, given a space to fill in my emphasis of study. Since I am thankfully not limited to the anonymous list of college majors, I write: “Existential and Phenomenological Psychology.” I have presented myself as a student/employee of UWG who studies “Existential and Phenomenological Psychology.” I have taken the depth and breadth of my experiences that comprise my biography, identity, role, and self as a graduate psychology student at UWG and fitted it into two bits of information. These two bits of information are not my identity; they are an abstraction of my identity. This is helpful for me because I do not have the time to list the sum total of my experiences of being said student and helpful for the Facebook community for similar reasons (who might not care about how I stumbled into existential phenomenology by way of cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism). Indeed, we see how this abstraction is helpful in understanding my “Occupation/School” for a number of reasons.

Now we have an example of the usefulness of abstractions in the presentation of ourselves on Facebook. This procedure of abstraction into, for example, an occupational identity, is a necessary limitation on the social presentation of one’s self that gets fitted into Facebook. In this example, one is allowed two bits to convey as much information as possible. This is beneficial because one gets to share valuable social information in an eminently simple manner. Moreover, the value of this specific example might be seen in the precedent for the question of occupation during social introductions at parties, dates, etc. While this might be safe and socially valuable, the occupational abstraction is not the person. Indeed, it says little about one’s family, relationships, convictions, experiences, etc. After all, you are not your occupational abstraction. When one begins to allow one’s occupational abstraction to inform one’s existence, then one becomes one’s occupational abstraction. This reversal of the abstraction process has been here termed “abstractification.” Here one finds an example in the executive that would sooner take her own life than face the shame of losing her job, which is unfortunately imaginable.

Okay, so it is possible to abstractify one’s occupation. Where does Facebook fit in? To be sure, occupational abstractification pre-dates Facebook by at least twenty centuries, but look at how it has been facilitated by Facebook. In addition to “Occupation/School,” one finds a series of discrete and limited categories that together make up the Facebook profile, and through which a person may interact with other persons. Each of these instances—the discrete and limited categorization of personality and the latter’s use for subsequent sociality—are modes by which Facebook has been responsible of the abstractification of its users.

By limiting the categories and options by which one may describe oneself, a necessary and even directed de-individuation occurs. Lanier (2009) explains that the Facebook design could have easily been done differently:

If someone wants to use words like “single” or “looking” in a self-description, no one is going to prevent that. Search engines will easily find instances of those words. There’s no need for an imposed, official category.

If you read something written by someone who used the term “single” in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple-choice database. Yes, it would be a tiny bit more work for everyone, but the benefits of semiautomated self-presentation are illusory. If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it. (p. 38)

While the difference between “single” and “looking” provides some information regarding one’s world of romance by way of an abstraction, Lanier explains that something more is lost by the pre-determination of these categories. This assumes that my “single” is your “single” is the nineteenth century “single.” In the nineteenth century, the status of “single” in your twenties meant that people whispered about you behind your back; to define oneself by such a detail would have been most impertinent! Today, when a woman who has been dateless in two years uses the term “single,” she might betray a certain bit of loneliness in her very manner of speaking it. A man whose five-year marriage recently fell apart might use “single” and betray a whole other set of emotions—for example, relief, elation, or despair. This might be further contrasted with a high school student whose use of the designation “single” is just one of a flurry of relationship statuses that betrays little more than the flippant manner with which romance has been held. The vast variability of meaning that “single” has when spoken by different people in different places and times has been standardized by Facebook into the generic status of “single.”

In the above example, the relationship status becomes a convenient marker for an infinite number of possible variations. This becomes a problem when “single” begins to depict something absolute and definite instead of something ambiguous and vague. Consider the analogy to painting. In Realist artwork, there is an attempt to represent on a canvas the spectral image of, for instance, a landscape. These pieces may be evaluated in terms of their similarity to the original. Cézanne, an Impressionist, has remarked that these masters have “replaced reality by imagination and by the abstraction which accompanies it” (in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 12). The Impressionists paint a landscape “no longer covered by reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and to other objects” (p. 12). Indeed, in painting one does not represent a landscape that one has seen, but shares a unique experience. Returning to the topic of Facebook profiles—these do not capture the individual in her singularity as if she were a finite object. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s description of the Impressionist artist’s task, modified for the present discussion: If the Facebook user is to express herself,

… the arrangement of [her words] must carry with it this indivisible whole, or else [her profile] will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each [detail] must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. (p. 15)

To complete the analogy, sharing oneself through the categorical limitations of Facebook would be akin to asking Cézanne to paint a portrait using only two pigments and without blending them. To be sure, he would probably produce something most impressive, but the point is that he has been supremely limited in his expression.

The second instance of de-individuation of which I have accused Facebook concerns its role in mediating relationships. Namely, one does not interact with one’s “Facebook friends” as a unique individual, but must interact by way of the abstractions of personality like a puppeteer with marionettes. As has already been shown, this dramatically reduces and nearly wipes out any personal individuality by restricting self-presentation to generalized personality traits. Suddenly the template by which your personality gets abstracted into bits of information becomes exceedingly consequential. Consider the question of gender. The question does not read: “With which abstraction do you most identify—‘Male’ or ‘Female’?” though this may be implied. Instead you get to decide which of the two you are. Consider the problematic limitations these two categories present, which effectively exclude transgender, pre- and post-operation transexual, and queer genders, among others, from representation. Nobody gets to interact in the social space mediated by Facebook as a transgender. Consider also the nebulousness of the genders provided. Are you male or female? One finds no additional space for qualifications, or variable options, depending on context. One only finds “Male or Female.” It doesn’t matter that with some men or women one may seem more masculine, or with other men or women one seems more feminine; one must choose what one is independent of context. Once chosen, every subsequent interaction can only be done with the standardized gender with which one has identified. Not only does this promote a dramatic over-simplification of gender, it also restricts one’s experience of gender to the designated dichotomy. By extending this example to all of the other personality identifiers on the Facebook profile, one begins to see just how restricted one is when interacting with their friends through the mediation of Facebook.

Imagine that, instead of designing Facebook profiles, we had designed marionettes. Like the Facebook profile, these puppets could be personalized in certain predetermined and generic ways. Identification with one’s puppet would initially be laughable. Yet we proceed to lower our puppets down onto the stage to interact with other puppets. One can only interact with other puppeteers—concrete persons—through one’s own puppet and through theirs. This is further limited by a restriction of only the eight to ten movements the puppet can perform. The dance is initially awkward and frustrating, and one might wish to peel back the black curtain and have a direct conversation with another puppeteer who, incidentally, may or may not resemble their puppet. Anyway, this continues until great mastery is had over the life of one’s puppet. One might even become impressively talented at making friends and gaining popularity—might become the life of the stage—despite having been limited to eight to ten movements. Popular or not, this increased sophistication of puppet-use is how the stage-world slowly beings creeping into the life-world. This begins when the puppeteer, having grown accustomed to, and increasingly adept at performing these eight to ten movements, starts to privilege these puppet movements in her actual life. Her concrete interactions with concrete people begin to resemble the puppet-interactions on stage.

To be sure, the beginning may seem harmless but the consequences are grave. Lanier explains that since social networks began mediating relationships, “A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become” (p. 6). One’s abstracted personality profile on Facebook begins to inform one’s actual personality through repetitive use. That is, one becomes so accustomed to one’s abstract personality as depicted by Facebook that it becomes increasingly indistinguishable from one’s concrete personality. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Lanier compares this abstraction of the person suffered at the hand of Facebook to the abstraction of music suffered at the hand of MIDI (which is the program responsible for the digitization of music). Lanier explains:

Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. It was a way for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool distinguishable from the music itself. Different people could make transcriptions of the same musical recording, for instance, and come up with slightly different scores. (p. 10)

As an abstraction of music, MIDI has been an indispensable tool for the organization, codification, and dispensation of music. But it can never reproduce the musical note as the “bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition.” Given his impressive and eclectic musical talent, Lanier should not be here accused of hyperbole. The digital note represented on MIDI is no more the original sound than a musical score is the actual song. In each, the former is an abstraction and the latter is a concretion. However, with enough exposure to the abstraction, one begins to increasingly forget about the concrete experience of which the abstraction was originally a mere representation. Lanier continues,

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in [which can here be substituted with abstractification] is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures [abstractions] are solidified into effectively permanent reality. (p. 10)

After time, one might no longer remember that there was anything more to say about one’s occupation than that it was at the University. This same person’s eyes glaze over in life when, having politely inquired about somebody else’s occupation, they are met with a description of experience rather than a two-bit response. Lanier wonders “whether people are becoming like MIDI notes—overly defined, and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer. This has enormous implications: we can conceivably abandon musical notes, but we can’t abandon ourselves” (p. 10).

Two types of technology, utilized specifically by Facebook but seen in other forms of social media, will here be described with emphasis on their role in abstractifying its users. The first details the “status update” which provides users with the opportunity to share with the greater Facebook-mediated social community what one is up to or how one is feeling. The second details the integrated use of digital cameras, with which users may share photographical representations of events or experiences with the Facebook-mediated social community. Moreover, it will be shown how, with each of these tools, the Facebook-mediated social community may interact with the concrete reality of the user.

The abstracted world of Facebook begins to inform the concrete world of experience through the technology employed. Consider the status update. With the status update, I am ostensibly able to keep continuous contact with my friends and loved ones. But since my contact is limited to the restrictions imposed by the template of Facebook, I am actually in constant contact with Facebook reality which, like MIDI tone, pales in comparison to the real thing. As has been explained above, you and I are both persons, each with a wealth of exceedingly unique and meaningful concrete experiences. For me right now that includes tired eyes, a restless mind, patient temperament, and a tremendous amount of typing, which is unfolding at an unusually late hour. Nothing I could state in a status update would sufficiently inform my abstract friends what the last several hours have been like for me. But I yield to the restricted social world of Facebook in service to what I have come to believe is just as good as the real thing. I might even include a picture—adding about a thousand words. This helps. My friends might see me in my underwear with swollen eyes, hunched over a laptop, and conclude something about my evening, but they are still limited to an abstraction of my night. The concrete experience of my evening has been collected by the eye of a camera and transmitted into the abstract world of Facebook. My concrete experience is represented by a picture, an abstraction. The reversal—abstractification—occurs when the abstract world of Facebook comes back through the camera and informs my concrete experience, like the puppeteer who has limited her life-actions to those of her puppet. Let me explain.

My unusually late-hour post invariably draws some attention, and one of my “friends” decides that she “likes” it. The supreme and absolute restrictions placed on evaluational options make exceedingly ambiguous the “like” that I have been awarded. Despite this, I have a concrete experience of being “liked.” There is actually a concrete experience that follows from the abstract indication that some person, infinitely restricted by Facebook’s program design, has liked my picture. The puppeteer experiences the affirmation that has been limitedly bestowed on her puppet. I have had a concrete experience through my abstracted personality because the latter has been “liked” by another abstracted personality. While the reversal has begun, it is not yet complete; abstractification has not yet taken place. Abstractification occurs when the concrete experience of being “liked” becomes indistinguishable from, or identical to, the concrete experience as a person of being liked by another person. Try also the scarier version: when the experience of being “liked” is actually preferable to the concrete experience. In its abstractified form, the abstract world of Facebook has intercepted concrete social contact.

Karl Marx (Marx & Engels, 1987) explains this concrete social world marked by the relationships that we keep:

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically-cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of you real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune. (p. 105)

As soon as they have been commandeered by Facebook, the “individual,” “specific,” and “living expression” are necessarily lost to abstract representations. Moreover, it is through this abstraction that one now communicates and relates with others. But the opportunity that this presents is compelling. In the concrete social world, there is a possibility that I am not the kind of person that I would like to be—for example, I might be ugly. In the abstract world of Facebook, I can be selective about what abstractions represent me. For example, I can doctor up a picture to remove blemishes, or I can pick one that gets my “good side,” etc. “Thus,” in the land of Facebook, “what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality” (Marx & Engels, p. 103). I can be whatever I would like to be. While Marx’s discussion concerned the abstractification of persons by money and commodification, it applies equally well to the abstractification of persons by Facebook.

[Facebook] converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [Facebook] is the truly creative power. (p. 104)

Now, instead of going about my concrete life, I am instead motivated by a fixed set of potential actions that might receive a certain approval rating when transmitted through Facebook. I can attend a baseball game as a concrete experience, or I can show up and have my picture taken and allow its subsequent feedback to inform my experience of having been there. In this manner, one becomes alienated from one’s own-experience, choosing instead to defer to the experience mediated by Facebook. Fromm (1990) explains:

By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts—but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside. (pp. 120–121)

The camera is a piece of technology that has been commandeered in Facebook’s abstractification of people, used as a portal through which users are alienated from their experiences.

The camera used to be for extra-special occasions. As such it had little to do with documenting regular events and more to do with a reminder of “this is what Uncle Mac looked like this year,” or “this was that family vacation to Hawaii.” These pictures, now losing their original vividness, have since acquired a singular aroma now bound in albums for walks down memory-lane. While abstractions, these pictures elicit powerful and transformative concrete experiences—“I remember when ….” Here the concrete experience is one of a memory that has been elicited by a picture, which at that time was capable of being held in your hands. Pictures once belonged to a roll of camera-film that would often extend across several such “extra-special occasions,” and this film would need to be developed at the photo shop. When finally developed, enough time had passed from the original event that there was a certain measure of an “oh yeah!” memory recollection associated with thumbing through the prints. The experience of remembering the event is a singular one but distinct from the original event itself. Seeing pictures from my tenth birthday party is not the same experience as me turning ten, but is an experience nonetheless. The photograph has seen a revolution. Like MIDI to music, digital cameras have increasingly replaced exposure cameras. Now these digital cameras are in every phone. Events are captured with the click of a readily available button. No more “extra-special occasions.”

To be fair, the alienating potential of the exposure camera long preceded that of the digital camera. Fromm explains:

Indeed, the taking of snapshots has become one of the most significant expressions of alienated visual perception, of sheer consumption. The “tourist” with his camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the world. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually he does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for him, and the outcome of his “pleasure” trip is a collection of snapshots which are the substituted for an experience which he could have had, but did not have. (p. 137)

Here Fromm describes the photographing tourist that is ignoring his own experience for-the-sake-of the abstract experience denoted by the snapshots. In his example, the caricatured photographer would have to wait until the pictures were developed in order to see whether or not he had a good time. The digitization of the camera has increased the likelihood of this type of alienation in two ways. First, the ubiquity of digital cameras is such that every experience is susceptible to “snapshot alienation”; and second, pictures may be reviewed instantly for feedback and the shaping of experience where necessary (as in “that one was okay but have more fun for this second one”). Moreover, with Facebook, photographs may become social capital instantly. A picture may be uploaded to one’s profile while the event is still going on and subsequently receive Facebook validation. The experience of the concrete event and the abstraction may now occur simultaneously. Thus, the abstract world of Facebook hovers about during social gatherings, patiently waiting for the invitation to place its stamp of validity on what has taken place. If a party happens and nobody is there to post a photograph of it, does it occur? With the increasing accessibility of technology, most notably smart-phones, this abstract world now follows us around, filtering our experiences.

Every experience has the potential for further validation by the world of Facebook. But the latter has increasingly obscured the former. Lanier (2009) explains how “on a typical social networking site,”

either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single (or you are in one of a few other predetermined states of being)—and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between friends all the time. What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering. (p. 50)

Friends get together to talk over a cup of coffee. Conversations increasingly feature the discussion of events that have been mediated by Facebook. This is only provided conversation actually unfolds. It would not be unusual to imagine two friends seated opposite one another, each of them on their smart-phones plugged into the world of social media or “Googling” for other bits of information. Since it would be impossible to imagine that they might both put their phones away, imagine instead that they both lose power on their phones and are forced to be in each other’s presence. Are they saved from the looming influence of Facebook? Or do they continue speak in the generic manner endorsed by Facebook: “yes or no” questions; replies limited to “that’s good” or “no, that’s bad.” Descriptions of one’s morning might read as would their status feed: I did this, did this, felt that, listened to this, so-and-so did this, etc. Once again, Fromm (1990) would describe this as a social exchange where both parties are alienated from each other. He writes,

In any productive or spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. In the alienated form of pleasure nothing happens within me; I have consumed this or that; nothing is changed within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. (pp. 136–137)

While these two hypothetical friends might be sharing spatial proximity, their exchange is of no consequence. Lanier (2009) explains what happens when two people risk a personal encounter. “A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other” that “cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction” (p. 39). Here one finds the relationship between man and man that Marx (Marx & Engels, 1978) has described, the one that is not obscured by abstractions or imagination, but is infinitely personal.

Social networks were originally available to serve as a tool that might facilitate concrete social interaction. As such, the breadth and depth of singular personality has been fitted into an abstract representation called a profile, available for review by a much larger audience than concretely practical. However, over time, this abstract representation has slowly replaced the singular personality from which it was taken; this has been called abstractification. Social media, of which Facebook has been discussed as an exemplar, has been responsible for the abstractification of its users in three ways. First, it has done so by limiting the description of self into predetermined and concrete categories; second, by mediating social interaction—that is, replacing concrete social interactions with abstract interactions; and finally, by alienating persons from their own experiences, social and otherwise, through the increasingly prevalent and accessible technology that has been commandeered by social media networks.

To combat the present example of abstractification, Lanier (2009) provides a few suggestions, which might also be read as challenges for those loathe to admit their own abstractification:

 Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site. […]

 Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

 Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

 If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively describable events define you, as they would define a machine. These are some of the things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others. (p. 17)

And as an exhortation delivered specifically at what remains of humanistic movements, he writes:

[A] campaign should be taking place now, influencing engineers, designers, businesspeople, and everyone else to support humanistic alternative whenever possible. Unfortunately, however, the opposite seems to be happening.

Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it’s strongly biased toward an antihuman way of thinking. (p. 18)