Facebook as cyber-architecture

Architecture is usually understood as the science, or art, of designing buildings with a view to constructing them, but among its current definitions one also finds concepts such as “network architecture”, and the structural interaction, behaviour or design of a computer system or programme, down to the attributes of particular components of the system. Seen in this light, I would suggest, one could easily conceive of Facebook as a kind of cyber-architecture, where “cyber” denotes the virtual reality-environment — as opposed to the actual, or concrete reality-environment — in which it exists.

In the light of what I recently argued concerning the potential for “social control” created by the publicness of a plethora of personal information posted on Facebook — and other social networking sites like MySpace — it makes sense to comprehend such sites in terms of their “architectural” properties as defined above. All the more so, considering that architecture is the art of modulating space into place, and the kind of world opened up by computers via the entrance into the cyber-realm peculiar to it is conceived of as “virtual space”, within which all kinds of virtual places exist side by side, sometimes leading into and overlapping one another in uncanny, hyperlinked ways. In this respect the web resembles a gigantic, rhizomatically interconnected domain, somewhat like Bluebeard’s Castle, where some people have entered more rooms than others (sometimes with grave consequences), and the rooms keep on multiplying.

What strikes me about Facebook and MySpace is that, what Foucault observes in Discipline and punish regarding a certain kind of architecture that emerged in the course of the history of modernity, neatly captures, metaphorically, the overall societal function of the wide array of disciplinary techniques that has developed since then, from which one cannot exempt these virtual places:

“A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen [as with the ostentation of palaces], or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control — to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. Stones can make people docile and knowable.”

I would like to add: Not only stones, but virtual visibility, too. Facebook and MySpace represent the cyber-counterpart of such architecture, and ultimately participates in its panoptical, disciplinary function. Evidently, judging by the cases referred to by Jeffrey Rosen in his New York Times-article on Facebook and MySpace (referred to by Mistral in my previous post), people are learning the hard lesson, that using, or “virtually inhabiting” these cyberspaces, unavoidably places them in the glare of virtual surveillance, with the same kind of consequences as those that prisoners in a panoptical prison experience when they engage in inadmissible activities in full view of warders.

An innocently intended photograph, or letter, published on one’s personal site on Facebook or MySpace, provides the means for (perhaps unexpected) censure or persecution by government agencies, educational, medical, or a host of professional authorities. Seen in this light, these communicational technologies comprise an extension of the disciplinary practices identified by Foucault, with the surprising twist, that participants in these social, communicational exchanges do not do so under duress, but voluntarily, with the supposed intention of sharing their personal experiences with others of their choosing. As already indicated, however, these “others” probably include individuals and representatives of agencies never counted in the circle of “friends” selected by users.

There is another side to this, too, however, although it cannot be separated from the panoptical side, and it, too, has to do with architecture. Historians of architecture usually distinguish between “non-pedigreed” (or “vernacular”) and “pedigreed architecture”, and Karsten Harries has drawn attention to the fact that most architectural histories turn out to be those of “architecture” such as sacred architecture (churches, temples), state architecture (houses of Parliament, town halls, law courts, libraries), other instances of public architecture (theatres and museums), corporate buildings (Mies’s Seagram Building, for instance) and the exceptional ones among private residences (like those designed by Frank Lloyd Wright).

It is not difficult to see in this list the implicit historical privileging of different kinds of society: sacred buildings (which predominated in architectural history until the 18th-century European Enlightenment) signify premodern, religion-oriented societies; the predominance of public, state buildings correspond with the nation state-oriented modern epoch, and today, the predominance of corporate buildings is symptomatic of the economically-oriented, postmodern society.

There is one big difference between the first two kinds of society and the last: Harries points out that, when sacred buildings like temples and churches predominated, and also when the public buildings signifying the centrality of the state preponderated, these architectural works were linked with a sense of community. In Harries’s words (in ‘The ethical function of architecture’):

“The ethical function of architecture is inevitably also a public function. Sacred and public architecture provides the community with a center or centers. Individuals gain their sense of place in a history, in a community, by relating their dwelling to that center.”

It is significant that “centre” is here understood in both a spatial and a cosmological sense — the church or temple occupied a politically important geographic place in the city, and also signified a symbolically crucial “place” or beacon in the religious or cosmological beliefs of these people (that is, regarding their spiritual “place” in the universe). This is why it was significant in promoting a sense of community. In the postmodern world, where economic considerations dominate, this sense of community is not entirely absent, but exists only in a fragmentary manner, and although, as Joel Bakan has observed, corporations structure our lives today, corporate culture does not promote a sense of community beyond the fragile one that adheres to brand or product loyalty.

But where does Facebook fit into all of this? It has to do with the fragmented, non-centred structure of postmodern society, from which, by all accounts, many (especially young) people feel alienated. Sherry Turkle (in Life on the screen) discusses several instances of young people who, not being able to secure a fulfilling job, having to settle for something arbitrary in the end (just to have an income), increasingly find personal and social fulfilment on the internet, in MUDs and social networking groups — surprisingly, even to the extent that they report “political involvement” (of a virtual kind) in online community organisations, while simultaneously professing complete lack of interest in “real world” politics.

Similar signs of virtual community-feeling are evident in online game-spaces, especially that of World of Warcraft, which boasts millions of users worldwide. Several surveys have found that players get so involved in this gaming cyberscape that they neglect their concrete lives to the point of losing their families, homes and incomes. But the message is the same as that transmitted by indications of the many hours that some Facebook users spend on the site: in the absence of the sense of community signified by the architectural-historical role of churches and public buildings, and because corporate architecture lacks the capacity to impart such a sense (like that in Houston, Texas, which Harries describes as signalling a “sense of nonplace”), many people are in the process of looking for the lost community online, on social networking sites and in the virtual spaces of online games. Such sites therefore seem, in this respect, to function like architecture has historically, and one may wonder what this augurs for the future of human communities.