A few weeks before winter break, I realized that I rarely upload my photos to Facebook. Every Sunday my friends clutter my news feed with images of pregames, parties and other debauchery, but my weekends never seem unique or interesting enough to share. So, one Friday, I decided to overcome my insecurities and pretentions, and photograph my night. I called it a social experiment. All evening I went around demanding that people look like they were having fun so I could take pictures of them.
The other day, I mentioned to my friend that in retrospect, those pictures made that Friday seem particularly fun. His response was, “Yeah, but it was a great night anyway.”
Well, what made it any better than a typical Friday night at Bowdoin? Did its presence in social media change our memory of the event? And even if sharing those pictures did impact my memory of the night, my real experience was undeniably improved by the evening’s depiction.
Where did the event end and its representation begin?
In “Simulacra and Simulation,” Jean Baudrillard ponders the relationship between the “territory” of reality and its representative “map.” He writes, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it…it is the map that engenders the territory.” Baudrillard calls Disneyland a “social microcosm,” saying that it is a “perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.”
But what is more of a simulated social microcosm than Facebook? We’re always immersed in its pseudo-community where we construct a persona and interact with other profiles. But because of our constant engagement with social media, Facebook ceases to be merely a microcosm. It becomes a product of what Baudrillard calls “hyperreality.”
Later in his writing, Baudrillard says that “Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations.”
Money has many different definitions, but ultimately we desire it because we think it’ll increase our pleasure. Doesn’t Facebook function similarly? We contribute to Facebook in exchange for the pleasure of things like friend requests, comments, and likes, which measure the value of our profile. Because Facebook quantifies our social experience, we can objectively maximize our profile’s worth. Facebook’s system of capital may seem artificial, but it can penetrate our physical lives by affecting our emotions or producing “real” money. Consider Justin Bieber, who’s made a fortune off social media. His representation on the Internet—which is meticulously constructed and groomed—constantly earns him profit.
Earlier forms of media were also driven by capital, but the Internet breaks down the divide between the producers and consumers of information. With newspapers, radio and television, a clearly defined group controls the media. This group can maximize profits by manipulating the other group—the masses—with the distribution of information.
Social media reconfigures the relationship between producer and consumer. Initially, this may seem to empower the masses by diminishing the value of monetary capital. Baudrillard claims that “none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself…Undoubtedly this will end up in socialism.”
But this “socialism” is not necessarily what we traditionally imagine. Baudrillard adds that, “By an unforeseen twist of events…it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge.”
The idea of Facebook capital can reconfigure our understanding of social interaction: everyone starts on the same page (pun intended) and can work his or her way through the system.
However, we must consider that social media is not objective or communal. Facebook is a corporation constantly profiting from people’s time on its site, so the profit motive shapes the website’s layout and structure.
By constructing and defining our socio-political experiences, can websites replace nations? Most websites, unlike nations, don’t purport to have a moral grounding—to stand for “liberty and justice.” The rules of a website aren’t inscribed in a constitution, but rather in a license agreement that we all approve but seldom read or understand. This agreement is a kind of “social contract” through which we give up freedoms and privacies in exchange for membership—or citizenship—of social media.
So maybe Facebook’s appropriation of social interaction is a corporate takeover disguised as a populist revolution. Or maybe social media is no more or less real than other social interaction, but just creepy because of the archive it creates. Or maybe none of this matters, and I should go back on Facebook.
Jesse Ortiz is a member of the class of 2016.