them into your Facebook profile, it is now your abstract Facebook profile that has restricted your concrete life experiences! Following Fromm (1990), I have chosen to call this procedure “abstractification.”
Abstractification begins with a basic abstraction—kind of like how a tree you can draw in five seconds symbolizes tree, but doesn’t really represent any real tree. The five-second sketch “tree” saves time when trying to draw or describe a tree—“you know, a brown trunk that is perpendicular to a grassy setting with a green, symmetrical ball of leaves at the top.” Such a tree isn’t growing outside your apartment, but you don’t have time or patience to describe it in detail. With the abstract tree, there is no problem. The problem arises with abstractification. Abstractification occurs when the abstraction becomes more real when talking about trees than the living tree that’s growing next to the sidewalk. You might look at the tree and think “well that’s not a tree, because it’s not a brown trunk with a green bunch of leaves.”
My argument here is that social media, of which Facebook is the most contemporary and popular example, is responsible for the abstractification of its users. This means that its users—each a unique and singular person, have become increasingly generic; that is, they have become abstractions of themselves. Facebook has facilitated this in three ways: first, users must necessarily fit themselves into pre-determined, generic personality categories in the construction of their profile; second, by using Facebook to engage with others socially, users must necessarily identify with and through their abstracted personality—that is, their profile; and third, the implementation of technology—for example, the camera—has increased the number of intersections between Facebook’s virtual-reality and the life-world (it is in the latter where unique individuals come into direct contact with one another). While it has not yet been specifically stated, my argument here is that abstractification is not a good thing. In its use here, it may be understood as a loss of individuality—that which makes a person unique.
Recall the experience of creating your original Facebook profile. It may be difficult to think back before your virtual doppelganger came into being, but imagine that you are creating one for the first time. As you begin to answer each of the questions, you consider which answer best represents you. That is, among the available options, which abstraction most resembles you? Jaron Lanier (2009), the father of virtual reality, explains the ubiquity of this task. “Personal reductionism [or abstraction] has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in reductive ways when you file a tax return” (p. 48). There is little misunderstanding that one is one’s tax-return-identity. One’s tax-return-identity is a fiscal abstraction of a person that is useful for organizing and understanding one’s fiscal affairs. It used to be the ongoing joke that governmental agencies cared little about the individual person, preferring instead to consider them in terms of their social security numbers and gross income. This was funny because it had once been strange to think of oneself as nothing but a number in a machine, but since it has now become customary to identify with one’s earnings, this joke is seldom told.
So anyway, you’re designing your Facebook profile for the first time, and you come to the following question: “Occupation/School.” For the sake of simplicity, imagine that you are me when I first started writing this: a graduate student at the University of West Georgia (UWG). I type that in. Incidentally, I discover that the dual title is appropriate since the school that I attend also signs my checks as my employer. But there is no space to provide that interesting detail. I am, however, given a space to fill in my emphasis of study. Since I am thankfully not limited to the anonymous list of college majors, I write: “Existential and Phenomenological Psychology.” I have presented myself as a student/employee of UWG who studies “Existential and Phenomenological Psychology.” I have taken the depth and breadth of my experiences that comprise my biography, identity, role, and self as a graduate psychology student at UWG and fitted it into two bits of information. These two bits of information are not my identity; they are an abstraction of my identity. This is helpful for me because I do not have the time to list the sum total of my experiences of being said student and helpful for the Facebook community for similar reasons (who might not care about how I stumbled into existential phenomenology by way of cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism). Indeed, we see how this abstraction is helpful in understanding my “Occupation/School” for a number of reasons.
Now we have an example of the usefulness of abstractions in the presentation of ourselves on Facebook. This procedure of abstraction into, for example, an occupational identity, is a necessary limitation on the social presentation of one’s self that gets fitted into Facebook. In this example, one is allowed two bits to convey as much information as possible. This is beneficial because one gets to share valuable social information in an eminently simple manner. Moreover, the value of this specific example might be seen in the precedent for the question of occupation during social introductions at parties, dates, etc. While this might be safe and socially valuable, the occupational abstraction is not the person. Indeed, it says little about one’s family, relationships, convictions, experiences, etc. After all, you are not your occupational abstraction. When one begins to allow one’s occupational abstraction to inform one’s existence, then one becomes one’s occupational abstraction. This reversal of the abstraction process has been here termed “abstractification.” Here one finds an example in the executive that would sooner take her own life than face the shame of losing her job, which is unfortunately imaginable.
Okay, so it is possible to abstractify one’s occupation. Where does Facebook fit in? To be sure, occupational abstractification pre-dates Facebook by at least twenty centuries, but look at how it has been facilitated by Facebook. In addition to “Occupation/School,” one finds a series of discrete and limited categories that together make up the Facebook profile, and through which a person may interact with other persons. Each of these instances—the discrete and limited categorization of personality and the latter’s use for subsequent sociality—are modes by which Facebook has been responsible of the abstractification of its users.
By limiting the categories and options by which one may describe oneself, a necessary and even directed de-individuation occurs. Lanier (2009) explains that the Facebook design could have easily been done differently:
If someone wants to use words like “single” or “looking” in a self-description, no one is going to prevent that. Search engines will easily find instances of those words. There’s no need for an imposed, official category.
If you read something written by someone who used the term “single” in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple-choice database. Yes, it would be a tiny bit more work for everyone, but the benefits of semiautomated self-presentation are illusory. If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it. (p. 38)
While the difference between “single” and “looking” provides some information regarding one’s world of romance by way of an abstraction, Lanier explains that something more is lost by the pre-determination of these categories. This assumes that my “single” is your “single” is the nineteenth century “single.” In the nineteenth century, the status of “single” in your twenties meant that people whispered about you behind your back; to define oneself by such a detail would have been most impertinent! Today, when a woman who has been dateless in two years uses the term “single,” she might betray a certain bit of loneliness in her very manner of speaking it. A man whose five-year marriage recently fell apart might use “single” and betray a whole other set of emotions—for example, relief, elation, or despair. This might be further contrasted with a high school student whose use of the designation “single” is just one of a flurry of relationship statuses that betrays little more than the flippant manner with which romance has been held. The vast variability of meaning that “single” has when spoken by different people in different places and times has been standardized by Facebook into the generic status of “single.”
In
