Facebook: A method of social control?

Some time ago, I wrote a post called “The changing face of identity”, where I pondered the relevance of Sherry Turkle’s work on the status of identity in the age of the internet for virtual social spaces like Facebook. At the time I surmised that such spaces would not leave human social identities untouched. Judging by recent articles in TIME magazine on Facebook, my guess was right, but more importantly, it enables one to see an unexpected side of the social networking site.

So, for example, Steven Johnson’s piece, called “In praise of oversharing” contrasts Josh Harris’s experimental “art project” of the 1990s, where, first, a hundred-plus people, and later, just he and his girlfriend, lived together in an underground bunker, every moment of their lives recorded on film by a network of webcams, with the kind of “oversharing” made possible by Facebook on a large and ever-growing scale (it has just registered its 500 millionth user). In the case of the former, Johnson argues, we witnessed a case of “extreme” exposure — with every quarrel and toilet visit filmed — which hardly anyone would voluntarily submit to or choose, while the latter represents a shared space of limited public exposure — one that is subject to users’ own decisions about what and how much of it they wish to share, and with whom.

Still — and this is the important thing, as far as I can judge — for Johnson the growth in Facebook membership, as well as its popularity, is an indication of people increasingly feeling at home in what is neither the secluded space of privacy, nor the public space of prominent or famous public figures, but something in-between, which has not as yet actualised all its potential (whatever that may be).

There is more to it than this, however. Another piece in TIME — this time by Dan Fletcher — on the phenomenon of Facebook affords one a glimpse of another, less often discussed side of what may, to some, seem to be no more than an innocuous, socially useful internet site, where one can keep track of events in your friends’ and family’s lives. Moreover, privacy controls on Facebook allow you to set limits to the amount of information and the identities of the people you want to give access to it, in other words, to control how public you want information about yourself and your family to be.

There’s the rub, because no matter how “safe” and personally useful Facebook may appear to be, the company has on more than one occasion introduced innovations that were met with dismay on the part of users, and its privacy controls have been described as “less than intuitive”, if not downright “deceptive” (in Fletcher’s words), which seems to me another way of saying that they are not exactly user-friendly.

Why would this be the case, if one may reasonably expect the company to ensure that such control settings are relatively easy to operate? It may be silly to see anything sinister or ulterior in this, but judge for yourself in light of the following. Among the innovations referred to earlier, was the 2007 introduction of Facebook Beacon, which, by means of default settings, automatically sent all users’ “Facebook friends” updated information about their shopping on some other sites. At the time, CEO Zuckerberg was forced into a public apology for such unwarranted invasion of users’ privacy.

It did not end there, however. Following his hunch, that the amount of information that people would be willing to share (and that Facebook as well as other companies could benefit from) is virtually unlimited, Zuckerberg introduced a far-reaching enterprise called Open Graph last April. It allows users to comment on anything and everything that they like on the internet, from merchandise to stories on news sites — presumably on the assumption that you would be interested in your friends’ preferences, and vice versa.

The catch is that it is not only one’s friends who are interested in this. As Fletcher points out in his article “Friends without borders”, Facebook is able to display these predilections on the part of its users on any number of websites. Not surprisingly, in one month’s time after Open Graph’s launch, in excess of 100 000 other sites had integrated its technology with theirs. Three guesses why.

Small wonder that Facebook has had to look at its privacy controls once again, in order to “enhance” them, after the Electronic Privacy Information Centre lodged a complaint — relating to confusion regarding Facebook’s ever-changing policy, as well as its less-than-clear privacy controls design — with the Federal Trade Commission in the US.

It is easy to see in all of this merely a misunderstanding of Facebook’s “mission”, described by Zuckerberg as aimed at making the world “more open and connected”. I, for one, am not so sure, though. It seems pretty clear to me that the company is pushing users as far as it can to expose their likes and dislikes to other, customer-hungry companies, and benefitting financially in the process, of course. Few people would find fault with Facebook’s attempt to profit from its users’ buying preferences, but there is more at stake than that, as I shall try to show.

The philosopher Michel Foucault had observed that in the premodern age the individuals whose identities were fleshed out to more than life-size were royalty and nobility — the king and queen, for instance, were highly “individualised” because of their elevated station in society, while ordinary people, at the bottom of the social ladder, were largely left to anonymity.

What has distinguished modernity, and today, postmodernity, in this respect is the increasing level of individualisation of people who are perhaps furthest removed from royalty, such as criminals and individuals with a distinctive medical or psychiatric condition.
As the “panoptical” age of disciplined, docile bodies (as Foucault has described modern people whose lives are constantly subjected to procedures of “normalisation” and infantilisation) has unfolded, however, even those “ordinary” people who did not fall foul of the law, or became assimilated into medical and psychiatric institutions, have had their identities progressively assigned to educational and governmental data banks and population registers in a process of “normalising judgment”. The consequence has been that virtually every citizen in contemporary “democratic” states has become as highly “individualised” in terms of personal attributes — birthplace, domicile, educational qualifications, criminal record, and so on — as royalty and the aristocracy were in earlier ages.

Had Foucault still been alive today, I’d bet that he would have looked upon virtual spaces for social interaction and information-distribution, including Facebook and YouTube, as a phenomenon that has taken the process of individualisation a few steps further. Not content with the amount of personal information that one is already obliged, by law, to furnish to governmental, educational and commercial institutions, people have more than lived up to the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s bet, that they have an expandable appetite as far as sharing information goes.

The difference with Facebook is that, by contrast with obligatory information given to the state, the information shared with friends and family is voluntary, and that it is selectively posted with a view to promoting something — either optimal informedness among family members, or one’s personal standing among your friends, or perhaps one’s professional interests, by using the space for sharing important information (such as lecturers disseminating reading matter among students). But Facebook has not exactly made sure that information about users’ lives is restricted to this; in fact, quite the opposite. The very fact that the default settings on users’ privacy controls is automatically on “maximum exposure”, so that the responsibility for adjusting them rests on every user’s shoulders, is already quite telling in this regard.

It may be that, at this stage, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Facebook has succeeded in exposing users to more (potential) attention from other companies than they probably anticipated, have no more than financial or economic objectives, but the potential for extensive social control or psychological manipulation is vast.

Fletcher points out that, if Facebook users were to be regarded in terms of nationhood, the website would be equivalent to the third-most populous country in the world. One could also think of Facebook as an ever-expanding virtual neural mapping of the world, connecting more and more people in informational and communicational terms — potentially more insidious and less “democratic” than the “rest” of the internet.

In other words, one should remember that the possibilities opened up in this way also have a downside, namely that — as some of the developments discussed above suggest — the very communicational advantages represented by it may be (and have been) turned against the interests of its users. Initially this may assume the guise of commercial manipulation, but it is not unimaginable that the networking site be used, very subtly, for more politically motivated purposes.