Читать книгу Facebook - Taina Bucher - Страница 7

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.