Abstract
This book aims to find out how the specific architecture of Facebook, what it calls ‘architecture of disclosure’, has an impact on power and politics in 32 different countries. The author’s main argument is that Facebook’s ability to encourage people to disclose their personal and intimate life has changed the way people view public life more generally, which is now perceived through the lens of the personal and the intimate world. The Facebook business model based on turning users’ revelations into commodities is viewed as having a direct impact on the way people deal with the public sphere. The book consists of an Introduction followed by ten chapters: after having considered the literature about the political consequences of the internet, and the singularity of Facebook as a company that makes profits through the information the users voluntarily upload online, the author provides detailed accounts of the effects that Facebook’s architecture of disclosure has on different domains of political life. He concludes by proposing valuable suggestions and alternatives to the current social networking site architecture.
This book has a number of strengths. Firstly, it fills an important gap in the literature about the internet, addressing directly the peculiarity of Facebook in the shaping of the private and the public realm. Secondly, it grasps the core of what makes Facebook architecture different from other digital platforms; that is to say, the promotion of disclosure that blurs the private and the personal sphere. Thus the ‘political’ needs to be taken in a broader sense as a subjective expectation and as performed identity and not regarded only as field of organized politics. Moreover, the author contextualizes his arguments with very rich referencing from the recent literature about the internet and social media networking sites, as well as from classical sociological theory.
However, the book suffers from one main weakness, namely the methodological structure is insubstantial: there is no clear evidence of the links between the empirical data and his theoretical arguments. The author’s theory is mostly speculative and there is a lack of empirical confirmation. The author does not ground his research and thus, for example, he assumes Facebook has common effects throughout the world, something that anthropologists have already contested. Indeed, the results of the content analysis of 250 politically-oriented groups remain in the background and they are mainly used as examples for general claims. The whole complexity of the social world is flattened under one principle explanation not supported by empirical data. Furthermore, although the book aimed to investigate Facebook users’ expectations of political and public life, the social actors are almost completely absent. The unexplicated assumption of the book is that the architectures of digital platforms have the same impact in the social world regardless of the social and historical contest. Indeed, while the author purports to account also for ‘non-Western’ worlds, he makes no effort to consider local cultural specificities and for this reason he falls into an unpleasant ethnocentric trap. For instance, he explains Facebook political groups in the Middle East through the same single narrative. The cult of Ataturk in Turkey and the Facebook page ‘We are all Khaled Said’ in Egypt are both reduced to the effect of the Facebook promotion of a ‘politics of the personal’. However, the cult of Ataturk is an enduring product of the Turkish political culture that has been the subject of scholarship for decades prior to the rise of social networking sites (Özyürek, 2004), while the case of ‘We are all Khaled Said’ is entangled with a long-term cult of martyrdom.
A more empirically grounded research would have contradicted the presumptions of homogeneity. Architectures of digital platforms, as any other cultural artefact or technology, are always embedded in their own cultural world and do not have absolute power over users. I am afraid that although the author’s expressed intention is to avoid the ‘grand narrative’ about the internet, he creates just this in reference to Facebook.