Facebook

Taina Bucher

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509535187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Facebook has fundamentally changed how the world connects. No other company has played a greater role in the history of social networking online. Yet Facebook is no longer simply a social networking site or social media platform. Facebook is Facebook.

Taina Bucher shows how Facebook has become an idea of its own: something that cannot be fully described using broader categories. Facebook has become so commonplace that most people have a conception of what it is, yet it increasingly defies categorization. If we want to understand Facebook's power in contemporary society and culture, Bucher argues, we need to start by challenging our widespread conception of what Facebook is. Tracing the development and evolution of Facebook as a social networking site, platform, infrastructure and advertising company, she invites readers to consider Facebook anew. Contrary to the belief that nobody uses Facebook anymore, Facebook has never been more powerful.

This timely book is important reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone seeking to understand the Facebook phenomenon.

chapter one
Metaphors at work: Framing Facebook

As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg (2019a)

On 16 March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg published an open letter titled ‘A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking’. The letter detailed a radical new vision for the company that intends to move Facebook away from a public social media platform towards a private messaging platform. Unlike previous announcements, this seemed consequential. After all, most people have come to think of Facebook as a more or less public or semi-public space. When public and private institutions and companies say things like ‘we have to be where the people are’ as a way of defending their Facebook presence, it attests to the widespread notion of Facebook as a public space. The announcement that Facebook is planning to venture into more private communication channels, possibly at the expense of its most prominent feature, the News Feed, should not be taken lightly. While time will tell whether this move is going to be effectuated, to what extent and with what consequences, just trying to think of Facebook as a private messaging platform first, and a ‘public’ feed-based channel second, is not just strange but almost unimaginable.

In order to understand why this change in company vision seems more radical than any of its previous announcements, we need to revisit some of the developments that led to the normalization of public sharing in the first place. Like the many Facebook stories, this is not a story of a unified linear historical development, but of overlapping and converging social, cultural, political, technical and economic forces. The goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with an understanding of where Facebook came from and how it evolved, in order to give them a first sense of why Facebook looks as it does at the brink of a new decade. We have already touched briefly upon Facebook’s origin history in the previous chapter. In this chapter we will look more closely at the underlying cultural values and ideologies guiding Facebook, from the very cultural and technical roots of the internet itself through to the ideas and discourses shaping the origins of Web 2.0. Grounded in Mark Zuckerberg’s public appearances, interviews and statements, this chapter considers the discursive and rhetorical framing of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg’s letters and notes are part and parcel of a unified communication strategy and an attempt to speak with one coherent voice. As Anna Lauren Hoffmann et al. (2018) point out, Zuckerberg’s public utterances offer important evidence as to the discursive strategies used by Facebook in stabilizing the meaning and potential uses of the platform. Discourse, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, refers to a set of statements about the world that have organizing effects.¹ Using language in certain ways (and not others) works in reflecting and shaping social order. As Charles Bazerman has argued in his book The Languages of Edison’s Light (2002), technology is business, and dealing with the media, the public, financiers and government agencies can be as important to an invention’s success as effective product development. Nothing about a technology or invention is inevitable, and it is as much about the symbols and communication as it is about the product itself. Analysing Zuckerberg’s letters and notes as a set of statements about social media entails acknowledging their constructive role in shaping how we come to think of the current media environment and the ways in which talk and text can sustain particular practices. Just like Edison and his corporation, then, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook should be seen as self-conscious and strategic actors whose rhetorical work plays a crucial role in making Facebook Facebook.

The reading of these statements is guided by a critical awareness of the rhetorical power embedded in language use. Yet, discourse is not limited to language. The affordances and material possibilities and constraints of Facebook, hold discursive powers too. The chapter makes a case for an understanding of Facebook’s success through a material-discursive reading that considers a diverse set of secondary sources, including public statements made by Zuckerberg and Facebook employees found in blog posts, insider accounts, press releases and public speeches. By analysing company discourse against the backdrop of Facebook’s cultural context and placement in Silicon Valley, this chapter addresses the techno-libertarian ideologies characteristic of contemporary tech companies and internet platforms, the cult of entrepreneurship and the hacker ethic, as well as the symbolism entailed in office and interface designs, metaphors, cultural tropes and company visions.

This chapter is organized into four parts, each of which deals with the discursive framing of Facebook. The first part outlines the new Facebook vision by giving an account of the most recent developments that have led to a ‘privacy-focused communications platform’ becoming the proposed solution (Zuckerberg, 2019a). The second part revisits the social history of the internet as it relates to the cultures and visions guiding Facebook, particularly with regard to the prevailing normative ideas of openness, sharing and community. The third part of the chapter goes into more detail on the ways that the culture of openness and entrepreneurship manifests itself in Facebook’s company culture and work ethic. The fourth part of the chapter takes a broader perspective again by considering the work that metaphor and discourse performs.

From town square to living room

Ask anyone what Facebook is and most people would probably answer something quite similar. A social network(ing) site, a social media platform, a public forum, a semi-public news feed, a place to connect with friends and family, a mini version of the internet where you can find information on businesses and organizations of interest, a place to share news and discuss topics of interest, ask for recommendations and find interesting events. A ‘privacy-focused messaging platform’? Not so much. We have become so accustomed to thinking of social media platforms as a form of public broadcasting that Facebook’s new vision of turning the company into a platform for private and encrypted communication is not just radical but points to a complete redefinition of what social media is and should be. In the letter announcing the change, Zuckerberg talks about it as a transformation that would entail Facebook feeling less like a ‘town square’ and more like the intimate spaces of a ‘living room’. If a town square leaves people wondering with whom they are communicating and who might be listening in, a living room arguably feels more secure and safe. Public broadcasting, according to Zuckerberg, serves many important functions on Facebook, from ‘telling all your friends about something, using your voice on important topics or organizing fundraisers’. Yet, as Zuckerberg says, ‘many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends’. In order to cater to what is seen as a growing demand for more private communication, Zuckerberg’s vision for ‘privacy-focused social networking’ focused on integrating Facebook’s main messaging apps and platforms, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. As Zuckerberg (2019a) boldly proclaimed, ‘in a few years, I expect future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network’.

How did Mark Zuckerberg arrive at this drastic conclusion, and seemingly change direction completely? While paradoxical in terms of how Facebook has always presented itself as an open platform that helps the whole world to connect, the sudden focus on private communication and moving away from a publicly oriented news feed should not come as a big surprise. After years of privacy scandals, a changing political climate that spurred the proliferation of terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’, and an increasingly harsher climate for public discourse that rewards extreme opinions and viral content, Facebook had to come up with more than an apology. More than simply answering to years of privacy mishaps, the new emphasis on private communication is also a strategic business decision that sees Facebook taking big steps in confronting its main competitor and only large hurdle towards consolidating globally – China’s WeChat.

If Facebook has spent the majority of its seventeen years of existence on ‘making the world more open and connected’, the new ‘pivot to privacy’ came amid a more rampant move towards redefining the company’s mission in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election. With an increasingly hate-plagued platform that saw Facebook triple its security and moderation staff in the years following the election, Zuckerberg had come to the realization that product change was in order. The first signs of redefining Facebook’s service came in 2017 when Facebook changed its mantra for the first time in over a decade. Zuckerberg’s lengthiest attempt at a redefinition came in the form of an open letter to the Facebook ‘community’ in February 2017. The letter, titled ‘Building Global Community’, explained how Zuckerberg had come to rethink Facebook’s role in society (Zuckerberg, 2017a). Over the course of a staggering 2,000 words, the letter, which became more colloquially known as the Facebook manifesto, made a case for seeing Facebook – and himself – as global community builders. In contrast to Facebook’s earlier conceptualizations of community that had foregrounded global expansion, the post-2016 election period seemed to bring about a more inward-looking mode, whereby Zuckerberg had taken it upon himself to strengthen people’s bonds. In a rather monumental tone that had many commentators speculating about Zuckerberg’s political ambitions, Zuckerberg asked rhetorically whether ‘we are building the world we all want’. Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook had spent more energy trying to connect people than maintaining those connections after the fact. The company was thus changing direction going forward, developing communities for support, safety and an informed public. ‘In times like these’, Zuckerberg wrote, ‘the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us’ (Zuckerberg, 2017a).

A few months later, in June 2017, Zuckerberg finally unveiled Facebook’s new mission statement. Speaking at the first ever Facebook Community Summit, Zuckerberg suggested that the time had come to change the company’s long-time mantra of ‘making the world more open and connected’. ‘To set our course as a company for the next decade’, Zuckerberg declared, Facebook’s new mission would be ‘to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’ (Zuckerberg, 2017b). At the core of the new mission was an emphasis on the somewhat nebulous term ‘meaningful communities’. In the Facebook manifesto, Zuckerberg had already described how they had found that ‘more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call “very meaningful” groups’ [emphasis added]. These are essentially the Facebook groups that turn out to be particularly important and relevant to those joining them, for example parenting groups for new parents. At the Community Summit, the ‘we’ and ‘groups’ of the previous message had been subtly replaced by ‘they’ [Facebook users] and ‘communities’, respectively, making it appear as if the term ‘meaningful communities’ had originated with Facebook users themselves (see Zuckerberg, 2017b).

The change from ‘very meaningful groups’ to ‘meaningful communities’ was far from coincidental. The marriage of the terms ‘meaningful’ and ‘communities’ was essentially part and parcel of a branding operation that gained particular urgency after trouble spiralled in 2016. While the history of Facebook includes a series of privacy scandals and political controversies, there was something about the scale and gravity of a new kind of reality that seemed to demand a more serious redefinition of what Facebook is and should be. Caught up in multiple data breaches, free-speech controversies, accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and a proliferation of fake accounts, it is safe to say that Facebook found itself miles away from its original image as a network of friends. As a result, the focus on private communication via groups and ‘meaningful communities’ became a central force in fostering a more positive image of a community-geared ‘social infrastructure’.

While the recasting of Facebook from public broadcasting to private communication might be difficult to grasp at first, there is nothing inevitable or natural about the idea of Facebook as a town square to begin with. Just consider how Zuckerberg described the ways in which the meaning of public sharing and openness first had to be established:

When I built the first version of Facebook, almost nobody I knew wanted a public page on the internet. That seemed scary. But as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe sharing with their friends online. Control was key. With Facebook, for the first time, people had the tools they needed to do this. That’s how Facebook became the world’s biggest community online. We made it easy for people to feel comfortable sharing things about their real lives. (Zuckerberg, 2011b)

Contrary to the prevailing discourse around social media, this description suggests that public sharing is not something people do naturally, it has to be invented and repeated until it seems like a natural thing to do. Here we are reminded of Paul Edwards’ study of politics and technology during the Cold War, in which he showed how technologies and the terms under which they are understood are ‘quite literally fought inside a quintessentially semiotic space’ (1997: 120). Some discourses stick more than others and help to frame not just how people think of a technology or a company, but perhaps more importantly how those discursive dimensions sift into and become integrated into cultural life and subjective experience in general.

Techno-utopianism and the open internet

Facebook is both shaped by and shapes the history of the internet. To understand the cultural values at play in Facebook, and how these values are starting to turn on themselves, we need to revisit the social history and cultures out of which the company grew. First, there is the longer history of the internet itself, which originated as a non-commercial network created by government researchers and computer scientists for the purpose of connecting anyone on the network to anyone else (Zittrain, 2008: 27). Secondly, the discourse of Facebook must be understood against a certain way of thinking and talking about the intersection of technology, economy and society reminiscent of the techno-scientific communities of the Californian Bay Area that helped to shape the contemporary landscape of digital networking technologies. For all its discourse of openness, connectivity and sharing, Facebook didn’t invent it.

The internet was originally cast as a liberatory and open space, where networking and sharing were the dominant ideals. The ‘standard folklore’ of the internet, as Tom Streeter (2011) calls it, has always emphasized its imagined openness and freedom as a defining characteristic. This folklore u...