For example, in 2013 when launching Internet.org, a consortium between Facebook, mobile handset makers, a browser company (Opera) and network infrastructure manufacturers, Zuckerberg basically outlined a techno-political vision for addressing economic disparities by means of internet connectivity.
Zuckerberg does not merely invoke global politics in public discourse about Facebook. He is also more directly involved in domestic and foreign politics. He is, for example, the co-founder of the political lobby organization fwd.us, a bipartisan immigration reform advocacy group who are pressing for immigrant rights. If Zuckerberg’s framing of immigrants as ‘dreamers’ and Silicon Valley as ‘an idealistic place’ is not exemplary of political rhetoric, then what is?
Despite Facebook’s attempts to define itself as a social infrastructure and community builder, ‘Zuckerberg is careful to avoid indicating that the site is anything more than a simple tool’ (Rider and Murakami, 2019: 646). Against the allegation of filter bubbles or fake news, for example, Zuckerberg has consistently framed Facebook as a facilitator and conduit of information rather than a gatekeeper or publisher. When Zuckerberg had to testify in front of congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in spring 2018, he explicitly told them that Facebook is not a media company. ‘I consider us to be a technology company’, Zuckerberg said, ‘because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build product and services for other people’ (Castillo, 2018). So, in Zuckerberg’s terms, having a workforce made up primarily of coders, makes Facebook a tech company. In addition, Rider and Murakami (2019) note how Zuckerberg draws consistently on the idea of Facebook as a facilitator by hosting networks. Accordingly, when pressed for answers on the spreading of mis- and disinformation, for example, Zuckerberg is quick to point out that it is people’s networks, not Facebook, that show us content. When drawing on the network metaphor for an explanation, Zuckerberg is clearly leaning on the myth of the internet as a stateless, democratic force that knows and shows no boundaries. The idea of the internet as a stateless cyberspace is not well founded. We know from the body of literature on internet governance and internet infrastructure (Mueller, 2010; DeNardis, 2014) that the internet knows and obeys state boundaries. The locality of the internet matters. Although largely regulated through multi-stakeholder groups and global organizations, the internet is both a very physical and political entity that is not just controlled by state actors but looks and feels different in different geographical locations.
Where does this selective and strategic differential framing of Facebook as either a town or nation leave us in terms of locating Facebook? If Facebook’s locality depends on who and when you ask, what, then, is the guidebook for? Put differently, what territory is being mapped out? Rather than thinking of Facebook in terms of fixed spatial metaphors such as squares, cities or states, the notion of topology offers a language for articulating the instabilities and fluctuations characteristic of malleable and changing entities such as Facebook. In its mathematical origin, topology is concerned with the theorem of the continuum, of how the properties of objects are preserved under continuous deformations (Lury et al., 2012). In contrast to ‘“Euclidean” space with its familiar geometry of stable, singular entities positioned against the external backdrop of a static space and linear time’, a topological approach accentuates how the infinite and differential character of relations has the capacity to generate its own ‘space-time, with its particular scales, extension and rhythms’ (Marres, 2012: 292). Whereas Cartesian coordinates enable us to measure a certain space, topology is not concerned with size and measurement as such but with the ways in which ‘relationships between various points/agents enact a space themselves’ (Decuypere and Simons, 2016: 374). A topological approach, especially as it has been adopted within the social sciences and the humanities, sees space and time not as a priori but as something produced by ‘entities-in-relation’ (Marres, 2012: 289). The primary analytic category is relationality, where change is not an exception but fundamental to how spaces are configured.
Bringing a topological approach to bear on Facebook means paying close attention to unfolding configurations and reconfigurations (Suchman, 2007), and grappling with the variations and multiplicities that Facebook produces. Such a view has multiple implications. First, it means we have to get rid of thinking of Facebook as one thing, with a stable and invariant core. In this sense, Facebook is multiple, coming together in various ways as a result of different configurations. This means that what we take Facebook to be is a result of different elements being gathered in a specific way at a specific time. For example, patents, earning reports, profit margins, code stacks and features may come together in a board meeting temporality stabilizing and producing one single object that we conventionally call Facebook. In a different instance, for the human rights activist in Tunisia, what is called Facebook comes together through government censorship, content policies, the lack of information about political ad spending, the inexplicable removal of an activist’s video and content moderation. This brings us to a second point that we need to get rid of when adopting a topological approach to Facebook, which is the idea that these stories and configurations hang easily together or cohere. Although the world, especially the scientific world, generally demands some form of consistency, we need to recognize that Facebook and the telling of stories about Facebook are much messier than that. As John Law argues (2004), coherence can only be achieved in theory and not in practice. The fact that there are different stories and gatherings of elements should not be confused with perspectivalism, the idea that there are different perspectives on a stable object (Mol, 2002). When we talk about non-coherence with regard to Facebook it is to acknowledge its elusiveness and ambivalence. While it might be challenging to work with multiplicity, relationality, non-coherence or gatherings as analytical categories, this is only the case if we expect the story to follow a ‘smooth and singular narrative of the kind offered by a textbook’ (Law, 2004: 98). Alas, this is not the goal of this book.
It’s complicated
Facebook is no easy target. Just as telling the story of Facebook, as if there was one coherent and neat story to tell, is not really possible; neither is delineating the target in the first place. What Facebook is depends not just on whom you ask but when you ask. Ontologically, we might say that Facebook is not just variable in the technical sense as it is constantly evolving, changing and developing as a programmed entity with certain features and functionalities that only exist in a given instantiation, at a specific point in time. What matters to different people, stakeholders and other actors is highly variable too. In the same way that the internet is not one thing but ‘has always been multiple’ with different histories (Driscoll and Paloque-Berges, 2017: 48), there are not just multiple stories to tell about Facebook, but Facebook itself needs to be seen as multiple.
Drawing on a relational ontology reminiscent of science and technology studies (see Mol, 2002; Law, 2002), this book works from the assumption that there is not just one Facebook but many. This statement is true on many levels. As anthropologist Daniel Miller suggests, there are different Facebooks depending on where in the world you are and whom you ask. As a scholar who has specialized in doing fieldwork in Trinidad, Miller’s Facebook, if you will, differs from the Facebook you would find in Denmark or Norway. This does not mean that one version is more authentic or real than the other. Reporting from a large ethnographic study of how social media is used in five different geographical locales around the world, Miller et al. stress how there is no core to what Facebook is, because ‘Facebook only ever exists with respect to specific populations’ (2016: 15). A similar point can be made with regard to the many different versions of Facebook depending on its stakeholders: Facebook for Business, Facebook for Advertisers, Facebook for Developers and so forth. Facebook is not just a company, a partner or adversary. Facebook may be all, some or none of these things, or something else entirely, depending on how it is practised in specific situations. This is not to say that there isn’t a corporation, a technical stack and infrastructure, an organization and a board of directors behind this thing that we call Facebook. Indeed, there is only one board of directors that has the steering power and one company called Facebook, but how these things come together and matter in specific circumstances varies.
The idea, then,
