Facebook-Gesellschaft

The Facebook-Society annihilates the present time by permanently archiving it. In sharing almost every moment we experience, we drift thoughtlessly and senselessly through time: without history or destiny, without solitude or contemplation. Liberated from all cultural bondage and collective memory, we long for a lighter way of being -- which may, one day, turn against us. The book takes Facebook as a starting point to investigate the modes of communication and cultural techniques inherent to what can be termed Facebook Society. Three theses – with psychological, narrative and politcal slants, respectively – are explored: 1. The book regards the permanent overexposure of the self not as a manifestation of narcisism in the sense of self-assertion, but as a flight from solitude: sharing is to be understood as a coping mechanism, an outsourcing of one‘s experiences to the social network. 2. Because the mode of self-expression carried out on Facebook is spontanous, episodic and documental rather than narrative and reflective, it generates more or less automatic, "autobiographies“ whose actual narrators are the network and algorithms: any self-portrait on Facebook is “pointilistic” and “posthuman”. 3. That social networks and digital media replace cultural memory and collective identity with customized information and phatic communication could imply the formation of a cosmopolitan community (a “digital nation”), one whose only mutual value would be the desire and experience of sharing. The question then becomes: how well does such community of “shared being” prepare individuals for moments of disagreement, if there is no real engagement with conflicting perspectives to develop robust, anti-essentialist subjectivities, as well as a climate of “weak thought” in a postmodern sense. The book offers excurses into history and philosophy that help understand the cultural changes in contemporary society. It equates (visual and verbal) communication in digital media with photography in that both are indexical, non-reflective ways of presenting the world (Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard); it reflects on the effects of media (books, TV, Internet) and global information on identity building, value systems and political commitment (Jean Paul, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard); it addresses the role of narration on identity construction (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Butler, Pierre Nora); it explains the obsession with sharing and living in the moment with the human condition of “horror vacui” and (post)modern individualism (Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Max Picard, Zygmunt Bauman); it applies modern concepts of community and pluralism to social networks (Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo).