A Singularly Non-Objective Meditation on the (de-)Merits of Facebook

Facebook simulates community. I take issue with Facebook particularly because it does this most effectively among its cohort (Myspace, Friendster), and to a far more insidious degree than any kind of alternate-world or MMPOG (the Sims, 2nd Life, etc.) --- precisely because it presumes to be nothing more than a reflection or addition to “real-life” systems of interaction.

This is the axis of competition among online social networking sites: who can most exhaustively digest and image the sum of interactions between people. Yet in its very striving toward exhaustive representation of “real-life,” the virtual network necessarily becomes a stand-in for what it attempts to mirror --- since there is less and less distinction between the virtual network and the real network. In the end, Facebook ceases to simply be a mirror when the interactions taking place in its virtual space begin to have consequences in the real-life space, rather than only vice-versa. Thus, the two spaces become equal spheres, supposedly interacting in parallel. But let us go further --- it is not much of a stretch to suggest that the virtual has already taken primacy away from the real. Most people spend as much or more time uploading and looking at pictures on Facebook than they do at the actual events in which those pictures were taken, and make many more connections to others in the virtual realm than could ever be sustainable in a real-life space, subject to the limits of time and social energy. Facebook then is the social relational equivalent of what Jean Baudrillard describes as “hyperreality:”

It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfect descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.

The Precession of Simulacra (emphasis added)

Here lies the functional essence of Facebook: to perfectly describe and enable a system of social interactions as an “operational double,” which ensures that we the participants never encounter any of the risks or difficulties normally associated with the real-life counterparts. This is fabulously attractive.

But since it is so attractive, on a long enough timeline, more and more of our interaction must migrate into that virtual space, free as it is from consequences. That is to say: we may begin a relational interaction in the real-life space --- perhaps because we arbitrarily consider it to be in poor taste to initiate in the virtual realm --- but then move this real-life interaction into the virtual space as quickly as possible, and thereby avoid potential “vicissitudes” which may arise (e.g. “I ‘Facebooked’ the girl I met at the dinner party, and it turns out she has a boyfriend”). Most relationships can then safely live out their existence in the database, while we commonly pass “Facebook friends” in the street and fail to even acknowledge their presence. (Perhaps we forgot that they are our “friends,” perhaps we are afraid of not having the safety of the virtual space.)

As the tangible, physical, face-to-face interaction becomes less and less convenient, and more and more anxiety-inducing by comparison to the virtual, it also becomes dispensable. We drift towards reducing our entire communal existence to a database. Databasing is the new reductionism, or perhaps the new Babel. And the more of our lives we surrender to the database, the more homogenous we become, the more subject to control. It is the same illusion of choice presented by consumer society --- except that rather than a false variety of products on a shelf, we are offered a false sense of self-determination in filling out predetermined fields in a form. Never mind that the very idea of a universal form is inimical to the concept of individuality. Besides, there is no need to be “truthful” either: truth is a non-entity in the virtual space; lying lets us believe we are cheating the system, thereby bolstering the illusion of self-determination and power. We then proceed to consume other people like products, while similarly offering ourselves for consumption in a tidy, deterministic package. “Short-circuiting its vicissitudes” indeed --- there are no vicissitudes when we are all alike.

Whither the real? Baudrillard continues:

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Facebook is in the third stage, and rapidly progressing toward the fourth. We can readily admit that Facebook relationships may serve to mask the absence of genuine real-life relationships, but as more interactions migrate into the virtual space, they cease to have real-life counterparts. The end result is that the online social network must bear “no relation to any reality whatsoever.”

As such, the virtual network strips away the tangibility of true human community and creates a horrifically poor substitute, a simulation which masquerades as “community” while concealing our true relational poverty. Eventually, given enough time, we will be unable to navigate back to any semblance of real community, because our simulated interaction will look nothing like it. We will have forgotten how actually to be together.

This may sound alarmist or excessive, but is simply a projection of our current trajectory into the virtual. Consider the recent flap over Facebook’s “mini-feeds.” Over 700,000 students took the time (however small) to join the “Official petition group” against the mini-feed, arguing that it invaded their privacy. I would argue two things here. First, what they found objectionable about the mini-feed was that it introduced an element of accountability to their virtual space that all too closely resembled the “vicissitudes” of real-life interaction. Second, it is alarming to note how much more care and ownership seems to be taken by constituents of the virtual community than by those same constituents in their real communities, that is, how much less it takes to arouse communal ire in the virtual realm than in the physical. The “eschatology” of Facebook begs simple but profound questions: if people cared about their neighborhoods, their streets, or even the people in their houses half as much as they cared about networking their online persona with other online personae, how much would be different? If people spent all that time they spend in virtual interaction building real communities and caring for real people with real needs, how much would be different? In “short-circuiting the vicissitudes,” short-circuiting the risk, short-circuiting the discomfort of the real, we have also short-circuited the possibility of doing good.

What is real community? I suggest that the prophet Isaiah has an answer: “Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?” (Is. 58:7). Facebook then, is its antithesis. It allows us to feel and appear connected (e.g. “You are connected to X thousands of people through classes”) while stripping us of the power to harness those connections to serve and sacrifice for one another. Relationships are meaningless without the ability to use one's agency on behalf of another person, as most highly exemplified in Christ’s statement that “Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). He then followed through on the axiom, with the purpose of creating a truly transcendent Community (the “Body of Christ,” that is, the Church). The exercise of sacrificial agency is the cornerstone of genuine community, and the means by which meaning is created in it.

Thus, migrating to a digital simulation, however totally exhaustive it may become, undermines the possibility of building shared meaning in relationship, replacing intimacy with “networking.” I would suggest that it also cuts the thread that binds up our motive and identity in community: common narrative. Espen Aarseth calls simulation “the hermeneutic Other of narratives; the alternative mode of discourse” (Genre Troubles: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation). Facebook gives us the feeling that we are part of “Something,” but that something is directionless and not building towards anything meaningful. If we somehow were to realize that the Something is meaningless, we would lack the agency within the simulation to effect any change for the better.

Why do we participate in this? Do we believe that interacting virtually will add meaning or value to real-life relationships? That somehow “adding” someone on Facebook after a brief and largely meaningless interaction in a group project or a dinner reception will increase the chances of that relationship either continuing or being more fruitful? In all probability, it lessens (or even destroys) the possibility of the relationship giving rise to real meaning, because the relationship has been instantly cheapened. It is crammed into reductionist packaging and moved out of the real and into the digital, where everyone can be anyone and anyone is everyone, where “truth” and “identity” are fluid at best and non-entities at worst. No risk, no remorse, nothing lost --- but nothing gained.

If we are the kind of people who value ease and escape, then the virtual social network is a total and tender opiate, inviting and even intoxicating. But if we are people who value meaningful community and collective construction of narrative, it is a disgusting waste, a pathetic squandering of human time and effort.

One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn’t conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination.

The Precession of Simulacra