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A post-structuralist interpretation of facebook profiles - Has the medium become the message?

Prima facie, facebook seems to be another capitalist experiment, attempting to monetize personal relationships and acquaintances through heavy data profiling and processing of the personal information of its users. Through a user-friendly interface, the site offers nothing more than a hosting service for its users, coupled with real simple syndication functionality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS). In that sense, it adds no additional value, its primary use being that of passive mediation between already existing relationships (while simultaneously acting as a massive information gathering tool for for-profit purposes). Indeed, Mr. Zuckerberg needs does very little to fiddle with what he offers, simply sitting back and watching as millions of facebook users voluntarily upload their personal dataD details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers It's success, although indisputable as a fact, may be attributed to a simple mimetic desire (__), magnified by network effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect), as more people jumped on the site's bandwagon. Sinister, exciting or just addictive, facebook plays an important role as a communication tool for its 400+ million user base. But what if the every facebook profile is not simply point of reference for a corresponding user, but something more?

According to psychologist Derek Draper (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/facebook-scares-me-one-man-explains-how-his-use-of-a-socialnetworking-website-spun-out-of-control-462738.html), Facebook cleverly taps into the modern desire for "continual surface stimulation": "_There is something about our culture that pushes us towards activities that are hypnotically shallow, rather than committing to something more profoundly_." In a similar context, people may join Facebook on the pretense that they want to stay in touch with people; gradually however, the site may become a gap-filler, taking a increasing amount of the everyday life, "_as it mimics the playground insecurities of primary school kids piling up best friends to find their social niche_" (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-512535/Are-Facebook-And-ruining-life.html).

Going beyond the psychological factors of facebook's success, I'd like to focus on the relationship between the user and his profile, as well as the user and other users' profiles. To what extent the information contained in a user profile represents a true aspect of the user's character; is every user's profile a true representation of its off-line personality? if not, is this dissonance perceived by the other users? What is the impact of this dissonance on how we perceive online relationships and communication, particularly with people that we no longer meet offline.

A Borges fable may serve as a proper introduction: In "On Exactitude in Science" (http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bu/people/bs/borges.html), Borges speaks of a great Empire whose skilled cartographers draw up a map so detailed that it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map was mirroring the Empire's gains or losses in conquered territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. Transposing this to our online-offline world, I am curious to know how a facebook profile, or a facebook friendship survives (or as Baudrillard would say: "precedes") the actual relationship offline.

To be more precise, in his book, "Simulacra and Simulation" (http://books.google.com/books?id=9Z9biHaoLZIC&dq=simulacra+and+simulations&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=BszVS_b9IsX7lwel_b26CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false), Jean Baudrillard discusses the interaction among symbols and reality in society. according to him, what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps symbols and signs, that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself, and that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map: "_The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map_".

Substituting the cartographers with the onwers of facebook, the land with our social web, I hope that you start to see were I am heading at: As the aforementioned examples indicate, there is a danger that the hordes of million facebook users are becoming so reliant on their facebook profiles (the simulacra), that it may lose contact with the real world on which the simulacra are based. Anyone who has spent a Saturday night browsing over the statuses and profiles of his "friends" instead of actually talking to them or hanging out with them offline, may be more inclined to see the difference between interacting with a simulacrum, instead of another user. The problem as I perceive it begins beyond the mere existence of symbols and signs, or facebook as a communicating tool in itself. It begins when the symbol, the map, facebook (what have you) replaces reality rather than connecting us to reality. When a tool for facilitating communication for bettering our social life gradually substitutes our social life, then the simulation has begun to eat up reality. In this postmodern world, real activities and relationships are in danger of being swallowed up the endless morass of entertainment and distraction, unlimited virtual worlds where virtual selves spend virtual lives.

Of course, the danger has been present right from the start of the "society of the spectacle" (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/): The "spectacle" tends to become the inverted image of society, in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity. As Debord points out, "The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images" (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm). In the Internet age of virtual social networking, one could say that the notion of images could include that of simulacra. The alienation of the user from his profile is just the first step to the degradation of information his "friends" receive about him. If no real communication exists between them, their information is limited/controlled by the simulacrum.

Trying to mend all the aforementioned pieces together, I suggest that entrepreneurship and the technological advancement of mass media have led to the creation of commercial virtual environments that imitate social interaction, unsuccessfully. Although I don not follow Baudrillard's reasoning in extremis, mourning as if we are left only with simulation and simulacra (having lost our access to the real), I agree with his perceptive criticism of a phenomenon common in our culture, where we seek to replace reality with a more manageable simulacrum, under terms and agreements fully compliant with the principles of advanced capitalism: In this world, life is not so much about living, but about having (Thesis 30) (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm). And in Facebook, everone gets to have something: Zuckerberg has the profiles of the users, his commercial partners have their target audiences, and the users? well, the users have their "friends".

Goodnight

P.S. Can someone claim that the fragmented picture that we project as our profile is truly representative of ourselves, indicative of our social behavior, or at least coherent with our offline comportment?

-- By NikolaosVolanis - 26 Apr 2010

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