perspectives to illuminate the meaning of a singular thing or to say that there are indefinite versions of Facebook that exist in parallel. As Annemarie Mol (2002) has argued in her anthropological study of how a medical diagnosis is practised, different practices do not just produce different perspectives on the disease, they enact different realities as well. This is not to say that everything is relative and that it all depends or that every reality made is equal in terms and effects. The trouble is not that the world is multiple and ambiguous but the fact that it seems singular because much work and politics have gone into making it appear this way. If we begin from the assumption that the world is already vague and indefinite, what should be of concern is explaining why many versions seem to hang together and overlap to begin with – not least to ‘make sure that they overlap in productive ways’ (Law, 2004: 55). For analytical reasons, Facebook may look like a singular object and be referred to as a social network site, a platform or infrastructure, respectively. There is nothing wrong in adopting these singular labels per se, it might even be the most pragmatic option to take. After all, how can you write sensibly about a topic while having to make amendments and caveats every time you use a certain label? Yet, pragmatism should not be an excuse for not explicating or operationalizing one’s terms of use. Throughout the book, I will try to be as concrete and transparent as possible with regard to the different labels used, bearing in mind that they will only ever serve as a shorthand and placeholder for the much more abstract concept lingering underneath – a concept called Facebook.
So, we have arrived at the notion of the concept, at last. At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that Facebook is Facebook, hinting at the ways in which Facebook has become something of a concept. This is to say that, as time has passed, what we take Facebook to be has acquired a life of its own. It is no longer just a word, or a label for a technological platform or a social network site (if it ever was). As the example of Jace mentioned earlier attests to, we are living in a society where people are routinely socialized into acquiring a concept of Facebook, sometimes even without being an active user themselves. Facebook routinely figures in policy discussions, academic discourse, news reports and public controversies. It plays a habitual role in people’s everyday lives and exists more broadly as a global sociotechnical imaginary. As such, we might think of Facebook as a ‘basic concept’ (Koselleck, 2011) of sorts. For Koselleck, ‘a concept is basic if it plays a central role in our sociopolitical language’; something we cannot do without when accounting for ‘the most urgent issues of a given time’ (Berenskoetter, 2017: 157).
To situate Facebook as a basic concept, then, means thinking of its power as something that can guide thought and action beyond specialized academic domains as it becomes part of a wider public imaginary. At the same time, for media and communication studies, thinking of Facebook as a concept and not simply as an instance of social media, means grappling with the fact that this company has gained the same kind of currency in our common vocabularies as more overarching media forms such as broadcast or the internet.3 While I will not make any totalizing claims about the unprecedentedness of Facebook’s conceptual status in the longer history of media and communication, it is safe to say that Facebook has fostered both new concepts (e.g. ‘Liking’, News Feed, filter bubble) and helped to reconfigure existing ones (e.g. friendship, publicness, privacy).
The point here is not to provide a definition of Facebook; quite the opposite. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that concepts have no identity, only a becoming. ‘There are no simple concepts’, they write. ‘Every concept has components and is defined by them’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 15). This means that concepts are neither fixed nor unambiguous. Instead, concepts are multiplicities that converge around the accumulation of their different conceptions and components.4 A concept includes all the conceptions people have about it, but those particular understandings are never completely stable or shared. So all our different ideas about Facebook come to form the concept of Facebook but these different ideas may not necessarily overlap.5 Because of their curious status as ‘similar enough’ but ‘not necessarily overlapping’, Mieke Bal proposes the notion of the ’travelling concept’ – the capacity of concepts to travel between disciplines, historical periods and dispersed communities (Bal, 2002: 24). Because concepts are dynamic, Bal suggests we might be better off studying the work that concepts do instead of chasing their particular meanings. This means that we have to pay attention to how the application of the concept of Facebook is ‘situated in a particular context and shapes (our understanding of) the latter’ (Berenskoetter, 2017: 160). Facebook can be understood as many things, only a fraction of which may be called social media. How Facebook is variously situated in journalism or electoral politics, for example, has performative effects on how we understand these domains today (see also Chapters 4 and 6). While Bal’s travels take her primarily between different scholarly disciplines, this book provides a different sort of travelling. It contains time travels (back and forth in time) as well as space travels (both geographical and topological). We will travel to specific domains, such as politics and news, and we will consider those who might not conventionally be able to travel (for political, socio-economic or bodily reasons). But before briefly outlining the book’s chapters, let us travel to a concrete geographical place with its specific conception of Facebook that may help to illuminate how Facebook is Facebook.
Facebook is everything
Facebook fully entered Myanmar around 2014. People had been using Facebook well before that, but they were only a tiny fraction of the population, early adopters and those who could afford a SIM card. Up until then, the military junta had imposed artificial caps on access to smartphones and SIM cards. In 2014, the cost of a SIM card suddenly dropped from a staggering 1500 GBP to 0.7 GBP. Mobile shops were swamped and the telecom industry expanded from one state-controlled operator to several new competitors, including the Norwegian Telenor. The thing you need to understand about Facebook, Nyan, a former employee of an international NGO that collaborated closely with the government and now funder of a local NGO, tells me, is that for most people in Myanmar, Facebook was introduced to them as a pre-installed app on their new mobile phones. Once the cost of SIM cards dropped, people went into one of the many mobile phone shops that had started to pop up all over the country to purchase a phone with a data plan. Most shop owners not only pre-installed Facebook and Viber, a messaging app, but also made sure they opened up a new Facebook account on the customer’s behalf. Because of the country’s restrictive communications policies and access to the internet, it wasn’t as if people knew how to use the internet, or even had a clear understanding of what the internet, or social network sites, were for. So it only made sense that shop owners had a stack of email addresses and pre-made Facebook accounts at the ready. Nyan says that there are many stories of people who got their new Facebook accounts already equipped with pre-installed friends, and in many cases celebrities and a collection of hot girls, so as to get their Facebook experience going from the very start. In Myanmar, for the millions of people who were able to buy a SIM card, Facebook was not a social network site, or even the internet, but something called Facebook, Nyan says. When talking about the role Facebook has played in Myanmar, about its role in the recent genocide and Facebook’s response or lack of response, Nyan says that there is one fundamental thing that Facebook needs to get right and understand. They act as if they are a social media company, but in Myanmar, Facebook is everything, Nyan says. Facebook is Facebook.
Book outline
Writing a book about Facebook feels like writing a book about the internet. Too much to cover, too many developments, too many twists and turns, too much that is already history by tomorrow. Consider this book an incomplete and unfolding travel guide – a book that cannot be filed under any conventional category found in the travel book section. As a topological mapping of sorts, this book will necessarily provide a partial picture of Facebook. That is OK, even to be expected of a book of this nature. Just like the internet itself, the fact that Facebook is difficult to grasp doesn’t mean there isn’t a concrete origin, prevailing myths, dominant discourses, social histories, cultural contexts, politics, technical developments
