Abstract
José Marichal’s monograph focuses on the ways in which people employ Facebook in order to engage themselves in politics and, eventually, to establish and maintain democracy in the digital sphere. One of the central theses of the book is that the relationship between Facebook and democracy is mediated by engagement with the personal, namely ‘a world inhabited by individuals expressing (and receiving) thoughts and feelings to [and from] self-selected networks’ (p. 12). The incorporation of social and political identities is transformed by users’ need to receive validation for their identity performances. Therefore, according to the author, Facebook impoverishes political discourse, inasmuch as it reinforces users’ personal stories at the expense of listening to the personal stories of diverse others. Facebook activism mobilizes and thus brings together users in political groups, but does not lead to taking action, and so devolves into ‘slacktivism’ or ‘clicktivism’.
In the Introduction to the book, titled ‘The Allure of Facebook’, the author presents his basic theoretical tenets, including mediated communication, namely people’s interaction via technology, which transcends time and space; identity performance, namely impression management, self-presentation and friendship performance; and the politics of the personal, namely the ways in which Facebook encourages us to disclose information about ourselves and connect with others. The chapter also describes the data, obtained from 250 political Facebook groups, and the methodology used for content analysis.
The first chapter, ‘Facebook and the Utopian/Dystopian Dialectic’, argues that due to Facebook users’ handpicked audiences (mediated publics), Facebook is employed for market-oriented rather than purely political activity. Chapter 2, ‘Facebook and the Architecture of Disclosure’, extends this argument by suggesting that, despite users’ concerns about privacy on Facebook, the structured choices imposed by the architecture of the site are designed to foster personal data dissemination and sharing, with the goal of increasing advertising revenue.
In the third chapter, ‘Facebook and the Decline of the Public’, the author stresses that, despite the pre-selection of our audiences, the more we problematize the self on Facebook via emotions and feelings, the more we try to relate to the public on the basis of the latent effect of social structure on individuals. Chapter 4, ‘The Personal Citizen’, delves into this effect by claiming that we are lured to Facebook by our innate need to control our world, which nonetheless turns out to envelope us in a consumerist culture, where we perform and count as commodities.
The fifth chapter, ‘Engagement as Personal Citizens’, foregrounds the emancipatory, participatory and interactive character of Facebook, whereby people can stake a claim in political power. Fleshing out this process, Chapter 6, ‘The Digital Front Stage and Deliberation’, argues that political identities performed on Facebook are not blatant revelations of our innermost selves to our audience or group of ‘friends’; rather, Facebook is an arena in which we seek to intrigue our friends with our personal experiences.
In Chapter 7, ‘Facebook and Mobilization: Beyond the Facebook Revolution’, the author highlights the ubiquity of mobile phones coupled with their capacity to create dense public networks, which in turn mobilize people – especially in totalitarianregimes – to take action. Nonetheless, Facebook’s operation under market policies can sometimes hinder its political functions, a tension which is also discussed in this chapter. Chapter 8, ‘Privacy in the Age of Personal Politics’, fleshes out the idea of personal politics by emphasizing the notion of a specified self, namely the norms that reinforce the predictable about individuals, who can quickly disseminate information through pre-existing networks, but fail to pave the way for the emergence of resistance to the formal state. Chapter 9, ‘Friending the Nation-State: Social Networking and Power’, takes issue with the personalization of the nation-state and how people deal with it. Even if Facebook seems the ideal medium for establishing a dialogue between the state and its citizens in a non-threatening way, making the public part of the personal, the author employs the notion of ‘mendacity’ to argue that this fails to happen, since we negotiate difference in the public sphere, making it impossible to achieve the level of intimacy and authenticity of the private sphere.
In the concluding tenth chapter, ‘How to Listen on Facebook’, the author summarizes his basic arguments and further suggests the shifting of Facebook architecture towards the inclusion of listening to and collaborating with other voices as an essential dimension of democracy, in order to render Facebook an integrated image of a public sphere through disclosure and connection – the two functions that have been the focus of the author’s discussion. In this way, when societal needs change, Facebook would become a useful medium for meaningful social and political interventions.
Overall, and despite poor editing and numerous typos, this is an informative book, drawing on sociology, political science and communication studies to understand how identity, community and performativity mediate between Facebook and democracy. The author offers some important observations that can lead to further empirical research, such as the tensions between offline and online identity indexed through the distinction between our ‘unique identity’, based on accumulated experience, and our ‘public identity’, based on our various roles (p. 104). However, I would have welcomed a more data-based discussion and interpretation of some key topics, such as identity performance and community formation. All the same, it remains a useful source for scholars interested in the digital discourses of democracy, and especially their interaction with social networks.