Facebook Democracy

The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life

José Marichal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409444305
• eBook ISBN: 9781317136958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Business

In July 2010, Facebook had over 500 million subscribers worldwide and the rapid rise of the site prompted Time magazine to name Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg its person of the year for 2010. This novel book advances our understanding of how democratic citizens are transformed by the "Facebook revolution". Despite increasing interest in politics and popular media, there has been little academic work on the impact of Facebook on politics in general, and on democratic processes in particular. The work that does exist has been limited to Facebook's impact on politics as a mobilization tool used by social movement activists. In this book, José Marichal argues that understanding Facebook's impact on political processes requires an understanding of how Facebook's architecture of disclosure shapes the construction of individuals' political identities by drawing users further into their pre-selected social networks. Drawing on a number of disciplines and an ethnographic analysis of 250 Facebook political groups, Marichal explores how Facebook's emphasis on social connection impacts key dimensions of political participation: e.g., mobilization, deliberation, and attitude formation.

Chapter 1
Facebook and the Utopian/Dystopian Dialectic

It is easy to deride Facebook. The application seems to be constituted primarily of seemingly narcissistic and trivial “status updates” that distract from “real” issues in the world. The narrative that Facebook is “making us stupid” (Carr 2008 or indicative of a “cult of the amateur” (Keen 2007 resonates with a news media that relies on polemics. As a consequence, writing and theorizing about Facebook’s perceived role in public life mirrors writing about the Web in general. Either a utopian narrative emerges that emphasizes the Internet’s emancipatory potential or a dystopian narrative that posits the Internet as a colossal and historic time suck that threatens democratic health in a number of ways, by contributing to a dumbing down of society (Keen 2007), a shortening of our attention spans (Carr 2010), a trend towards a self-satisfied “slacktivism” (Morozov 2011), a growing digital divide (Hargittai 2008) and allowing us to retreat to insularhomogeneous networks based upon shared experiences or interests. (Boyd 2010 that encourage selectivity bias in collecting information (Prior 2008).

None of these arguments is entirely without merit when applied to the Web in general. But I argue that these conventional challenges to the Web’s social efficacy do not apply directly to Facebook. If we are to accurately assess Facebook’s impact on power and politics, we must situate the analysis within this broader conversation regarding the efficacy of SNS applications or lack thereof for political transformation. This chapter places Facebook’s impact on politics within the larger conversation over the socio-political potential for the Web in general, with particular attention to the ways in which conventional challenges to the Web fail to account for Facebook’s unique position. Instead, it is instructive to look at early Web utopian thought to understand Facebook’s appeal and its potential impact on political life. Facebook presents a curious merging of market/individualist notions of the utopian Web and communitarian/collectivist notions of the Web. This is an important insight because Facebook as a business provides us with a sense of community for market-based, individualist ends. It is a sense and not a reality because it is a mediated public that we self-select, not the spontaneous, unfiltered public that exists in real life. Put another way, by giving us a “sense of the public,” our relationship to and expectations of actual public life are changed. In subsequent chapters, I’ll discuss how this reality of Facebook leads to more serious challenges to democratic governance. But before we can do this, we must explore conventional challenges to the Web and how they apply to Facebook.

The Power of Facebook

The advent of information communication technologies (ICTs) has brought about significant transformation in our civic lives. The emergence of ICTs has created a radical shift in the way we gather political information, the way we construct our daily habits and the quality and number of social interactions. As Benkler (2006) argues, increased server storage capacity, the proliferation of personal computers with fast microprocessor speeds, and the advent of broadband Internet access have combined to make it possible to store vast amounts of easily retrievable information in “the cloud.” This trend will only strengthen in the coming years. A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation discovered that kids in 2009 spent 7.5 hours a day interacting with ICT devices compared to less than 6.5 hours a day in 2005 (Rideout et al. 2010). As the New York Times reported, this surprised the research team because they did not think the subjects of the study could possibly squeeze in any more time for engaging with these new media tools (Lewin 2010). Additionally, 70 percent of kids reported having no parental limits on the amount of digital media they consume (Rideout et al. 2010).

Perhaps no other application online has produced as much loyalty and has been as transformative to the individual habits as Facebook. Facebook’s dramatic rise could be predicted by examining its use among college students. As early as 2005, 85 percent of college students had a Facebook account (Arrington 2007). Indeed, if Facebook were a country, it would be third largest in the world (Fletcher 2010). According to the Facebook monitoring site SocialBakers.com (Wauters 2011), Facebook gained close to 250 million new members in 2010, bringing its worldwide user rate to 585 million, an increase of about eight new users every second. The greatest concentration of Facebook users reside in the United States which accounted for about one-fourth of Facebook users in 2010 (174 million) (SocialBakers.com 2011). However, Facebook’s reach extends beyond the West. Indonesia has the second-largest Facebook population in the world and India, Mexico and the Philippines are in the top 10 in terms of Facebook users (SocialBakers.com 2011). While 18–34-year-olds make up over 50percent of the worldwide Facebook population, those aged 65 and over are the fastest-growing population, an increase of 124 percent in 2010. It he popularity of the sites does not appear to be waning (SocialBakers.com 2011).

Despite the proliferation of Facebook, we know little about how this transformation of our daily lives impacts public life. The movement of numbers of people toward mass-scale online network engagement is in its infancy. In exchange for attention and small amounts of personal information, users in the cloud are given ubiquitous access to documents and tools that allow them to efficiently cultivate their network of relationships. But how are these relationships changed by our “life in the cloud”?

Much of the writing on how applications like Facebook impact politics and power are shaped by a dialectic between early Web utopian discourses that presume an inherent virtue to online communication and the predictable and important dystopian backlash. Later in the chapter, I sort Web utopianism along two dimensions, a liberal utopianism (private) and a communitarian (public) utopianism. I argue that Facebook’s power comes from merging these two strands of Web utopianism by allowing people to attain the “public” benefits of communitarian utopianism while preserving the “private” individualism of liberal utopianism.

Both of these utopian discourses, however, have produced a counter-narrative which emphasize four key features: information overload, selectivity bias, digital divide and lack of empathy. In this chapter, I will briefly examine these challenges to the Web in general, and in particular how these challenges apply to Facebook. I argue these challenges do not resonate as critiques of Facebook because they miss the key benefit of Facebook to users: merging individual choice with a perceived collective public benefit. In later chapters, I lay out the potential harm to democratic societies from such a merging of individualist and communitarian visions of the Web. But first I discuss whether these challenges to a Web utopian narrative hold muster.

The Dystopian Web

The lived experience with ICTs motivated a set of challenges to these utopian ideas. Questions emerged about the transformative potential of ICTs. As a result, the pendulum seems to have lurched towards a dystopian view of the Web’s effect on public life. Applied to Facebook, these would seem to foretell a negative net effect on social and political phenomena. The dystopian pushback to Web utopianism includes five strands: information overload, selectivity bias, slacktivism, digital divide and empathy/friendship decline. While each of these critiques point to important issues in the social and political impact of Facebook and other SNS applications, none of conventional views of how the Web might harm social and political life seems to quite fit Facebook. I address each in turn.

Information Overload

A central concern is that the amount of information thrown at us through the Internet is exceeding our capacity to discern its quality. Rather than expose us to the world of ideas and make us liberal, empowered global citizens, the Web mires us in the world of banality. Ironically, while the collective knowledge of the world is being digitized and placed within our grasp, we may fail to take in their wisdom because we cannot get out from under the deluge of Twitter posts, texts and Facebook status updates that occupy our attention. As Smith (2011) quipped “if the Internet is cocaine, then Facebook is crack.” As I discussed in the last chapter, humans are hard-wired for social connection. An application like Facebook that facilitates these connections provides what looks like information but really amounts to meaningless dross.

Carr (2010) argues that this flood of information is affecting our ability to pay attention to longer, more involved arguments. In an effort to filter the mass of information, we take to skimming and summarizing rather than remembering and reflecting. Rather than make us more engaged, reflective and deliberative citizens, ICTs might encourage our more impatient, selfish, petulant selves. Carr suggests that “the cloud” serves as a disincentive for reflection by encouraging the processing of information in small, discrete, chunks. In a widely cited article in The Atlantic, Carr highlights how his ability to process information has changed as his use of ICTs has increased: “… my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (2008: 58). Powers (2010) calls for a technology sabbath to reclaim time for thought and contemplation.

Thus a key critique would be that this instantaneous culture of information means that we may develop participatory habits, but without the cognitive capacity to process and reflect upon the information’s meaning, a task vital to deliberative citizenship. Keen (2007) observes a tendency among Web users towards an “infantilized-self” that prioritizes “intellectual self-stimulation” (194) over “the impartiality of the authoritative, accountable, expert” (41). The result is a networked information economy that has “novices speaking to novices” (52). Keen observation begs the question of whether we are in danger of producing a generation of citizens incapable of engaging difficult ideas.

Political theorists decry the lack of civic literacy among voters and “the willingness and ability to engage in public discourse and to evaluate the performance of those in office” (Galston 1991: 227). While the amount of political information needed for a functioning democracy is debated, a dystopian view would suggest that what little attention was left for political information gathering and reflection has been irredeemably lost by Facebook.

Rather than usher in this era of “wise crowds” full of content creators, the Web has moved towards SNS sites that cultivate friendship networks. A recent Pew survey found that young people’s use of ICTs is moving away from content-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr and towards social networking sites. Additionally there has been a significant decline in blogging by teens over time. In 2007, 28 percent of teens reported blogging, by 2009 than number had been reduced to 14 percent (Lenhart et al. 2010).

There is reason to be cautious about fully embracing this critique. Blair (2010) notes that fear of “information overload” represents a theme that runs throughout history. She notes that as early as the third century BC, complaints about “the abundance of books” were prevalent. These concerns periodically emerge as new technology replaces old ways of gathering knowledge. The printing press in the mid fifteenth century significantly changed the way knowledge was received and reflected upon. The printing press increased information by an order of magnitude: it made books cheaper, but by making book-production more efficient, it invited the production of subpar manuscripts and took attention away from quality works.

In all these instances, however, the proliferation of information had pro-populist, pro-democratic consequences. Similar arguments can be made about Facebook. If the printing press made it easier to publish bad books at the expense of good ones, Facebook frees individuals from the need to say anything important. SNSs may constitute a new level of “information overload” where we engage in vast amounts of information dissemination and perusal that seemingly proceeds without any real motivation or intention. From this perspective, most Facebook status updates are mental dross free of anything that could be classified as “information” for public purposes (Hindman 2009). As Smith (2011) wryly observes about his own Facebook use:

I’ve figured out how to block Farmville and MafiaWars and obscene stuff like that, but there’s no way to similarly keep at bay the barrage of images of other people’s babies (a sensitive issue at this stage of the life-cycle), nor the whooping and hollering of sports fans (no less tedious in its written than in its audible form), nor all the bickering about having to grade papers among my academic peers, nor the predictable self-affirmations of the mainline liberals who make up the greater part of my cohort. (Online)

But this “banal talk” acquires greater importance when it comes from those we know. The daily musings of our intimates has always been more important to us than treatises from the great philosophers or positional papers from government agencies. Indeed this everyday interaction with our intimate social networks might make us more aware of the world around us.

Rather than make us less empathic, Facebook seems to connect us more to others. Hampton et al. (2011) found that Facebook users exhibited a number of positive civic attributes. When the team looked at frequent Facebook users (for example, those who visited the site at least once a day), they found this group was three times as likely as non-Internet users to feel that people could be trusted. Additionally, Hampton et al. (2011) found that Facebook users had closer ties than non-users and received more social (companionship), emotional (receiving advice) and instrumental support (tangible assistance) than non-users.

Further, a lack of complete knowledge about the political process might not be a prerequisite for effective citizenship. A vast literature in political science over the last four decades has documented the lack of information of the part of American voters (Converse 1975, Kinder and Sears 1985, Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997). Bartels (1996) suggest that in the absence of accurate information about policy issues, voters effectively use cues and information shortcuts to make political decisions. Further, errors in decision-making at the individual level are randomly distributed among the general population and thus when aggregated have little impact on elite decision-making. Lau et al. (1997) argues that despite their lack of information, citizens vote in accordance with their stated preferences the vast majority of the time.

Selectivity Bias/Homogeneity

But perhaps this is the main problem with Facebook. It isn’t that we are flooded with information, but rather, we are flooded with what Sunstein (2001) calls the daily me of content. Our flood of information is based on social networks comprised of individuals with whom we already agree politically. If Facebook exacerbates our already built in tendency to form social networks around shared characteristics, then our information gathering won’t be neutrally misinformed, as Bartels (1996) suggests, but will be more skewed towards whichever ideological “tribe” is ascendant.

An analysis of the level of political polarization in the United States is instructive. In the United States, the electorate is the most divided in a generation. In 2010, 60 percent of whites voted for the Republican Party and 37 percent voted for the Democratic Party, the largest margin since the National Election Study began polling (Brownstein 2011). By contrast, 73 percent of all non-white voters – African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and others – backed Democratic United States House of Representatives’ candidates in the mid-term election, according to the new analysis. A similar pattern was evident among perceptions of President Obama’s job in office. While 22 percent of non-white voters disapproved of President Obama’s performance in office 65 percent of white voters expressed disapproval and half of White voters expressed strong disapproval.

While important socio-economic shifts independent of the Internet are responsible for this polarization (increasing number of minority voters, realignment of conservatives into the Republican Party, and so on), one could argue that Facebook might serve to increase polarization. Lazarsfeld and Menzel (1963) found that political opinions flowed through friendship networks, particularly through influentials that shaped opinion on political issues and candidates. Mutz (2006) suggests a similar phenomenon is occurring in contemporary American politics.

Much of the recent scholarship on selectivity bias in online information-gathering suggests a mirroring of the broader political polarization literature. Lawrence et al. (2010) find that the political blogosphere mirrors Mutz’s (2002, 2006) finding about homogeneous networks. In surveys of political blog readers, they found significant ideological distance between conservative and liberal blogs and little ideological cross-pollenation. Being a part of an active online community often leads to greater political participation (increased voting, campaign donating and persuading others) but also leads to increased ideological polarization. Similarly, Hargittai (2007) found that Website linking behavior on political blogs suggests strong ideological bias. Gilbert et al. (2009) found significant agreement in the comment section of political blogs: about four times as much “agreement” as “disagreement” (as opposed to twice as much agreement for tech or entertainment blogs).

But Facebook networks are not blogs. There is good reason to believe that online homogeneity is not as serious a problem on Facebook as it might be on other forms on online communication. Geographic proximity and shared interest may be more closely associated with network formation than individual homogeneity. There is some reason to be cautious about the idea that Facebook promotes homogeneous network formation. Goel et al. (2010) found that Facebook friends were more homogeneous in their political views than random groups, but the difference (75 percent agreement for Facebook friends vs 63 percent for randomly assigned groups) was negligible and they underestimated the extent to which those in their networks agreed with them on policy issues.

On the plus side, social network members “are probably surrounded by a greater diversity of opinions than is sometimes claimed, (but they) generally fail to talk about politics, and that when they do, they simply do not learn much from their conversations about each other’s views … the extent to which peers influence each other’s political attitudes may be less than is sometimes claimed (Goel et al. 2010: 10). The inference here is that, as it concerns politics on Facebook, most users either shy away from political discussion or simply assume more similarity within their online network than actually exists. Thus the polity might remain largely uninformed, but will not become subject to an “echo chamber” effect in the receipt of political information

Because Facebook is based on social proximity and not shared interest there is more of a likelihood of ideological heterogeneity. There is not a direct overlap between what your friends and family believe and what you believe. In addition, Williams and Gulati (2007) note that Facebook’s architecture of profiles and status updates make it more likely that one could be inadvertently exposed to contrasting political messages.

Instead, people have broad-based impressions of those in their friend networks (general religious, political orientations, personality traits). Goel et al. (2010) find that people overestimate how similar their political views are to those in their online social network. People on Facebook assumed those in their network shared beliefs on policy issues like abortion, illegal immigration and health care to a greater extent than was actually the case. This mirrors trends within the US electorate where perceptions ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction The Allure of Facebook
• 1 Facebook and the Utopian/Dystopian Dialectic
• 2 Facebook and the Architecture of Disclosure
• 3 Facebook and the Decline of the Public
• 4 The Personal Citizen
• 5 Engagement as Personal Citizens
• 6 The Digital Front Stage and Deliberation
• 7 Facebook and Mobilization: Beyond the Facebook Revolution
• 8 Privacy in the Age of Personal Politics
• 9 Friending the Nation-State: Social Networking and Power
• 10 Conclusions: How to Listen on Facebook
• Bibliography
• Index