Justin Hendrix, at
Medium,
Bike lanes and World War II The Facebook Manifesto in a Time of Crisis:
The average American consumer spends nearly an hour on Facebook and its platforms every day. 79% of American adults use Facebook. Most folks in media consider this through the lens of media habits- engagement with Facebook and other social platforms has, of course, eaten in to consumption of other forms of media.
We rightly worry about the spread of fake news and filter bubbles. But as some scholars have noted, Facebook does something even more insidious. It replaces the public sphere with a space that seems public- like the neighborhood parent group. José Marichal chronicles this phenomenon in his excellent Facebook Democracy: The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life:
… technology challenges our conventional understandings of public and private, by creating mediated publics that have characteristics of publicness but are not quite public in that they are filtered, be it through shared interest in a subject or by kinship or some other factor.
Hendrix goes on to quote from Zuckerberg's
recent manifesto (which I have not read) where Zuckerberg asserts "Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location." He's skeptical:
Sounds great. Yet there is something deeply troubling about it all. Put aside the effects we are witnessing at the local level- the disagreement in a neighborhood group, and extrapolate to the broader global picture. This is a moment of profound danger all across the world, as democracies stumble and nationalists rise. Polarization is a major problem. Inequality seems intractable. The US State Department reports that freedom of expression and freedom of association are on the decline worldwide. Serious people worry we are on the verge of World War III.
I think his skepticism is warranted.
