Facing up to what Facebook makes us

We attribute many qualities to the social network, but there’s value in looking at what it shows us about ourselves, writes Daniel Browde.

On Facebook, two weeks ago, I clicked on an article a friend had shared, titled "Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook", above a picture of the smirking US president-elect.

Having signed up to Facebook reluctantly five years ago, I am now a daily user, and I sometimes wonder what I'm doing - what I'm complicit in - for those 15, 20 minutes of my day.

The article by Max Read was about how Trump's team eschewed traditional media outlets and used Facebook to spread its own free-and-easy brand of "journalism".

Read argued that if Facebook spent as much time stopping the spread of fake news as it did policing nipples, the US wouldn't be in the mess it's in.

I "liked" the post, but for the rest of the day wondered if there wasn't some irony in stopping there.

So I dug around a bit and found a worm ball of theories, accusations and denials that has only got bigger and more wormy since.

Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has weighed in more than once to defend his company's name.

Only one thing seems irrefutable: Facebook matters.

The first time a billion people used the site on one day was August 27 last year. (It now has 1.2billion daily users and 1.8billion active users, those who have checked in in the past 30 days.)

On that day Zuckerberg posted about how "proud" he was of this "community", which helps build "stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all our values".

I found his use of "community", with its suggestion of shared identity and some kind of common purpose, to be cloying and artificial - and I still do. The word loses meaning when it is asked hold those sorts of numbers.

But the fact that every day nearly a quarter of all human beings are scrolling and "liking" and "sharing" does seem to be telling us something.

To some - call them techno-utopians - Facebook's reach represents nothing less than the next stage of human evolution, the "hive mind" forecast by Marshall "The medium is the message" McLuhan and before him the French speculative philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

De Chardin wrote in his 1955 book The Phenomenon of Man about a technologically-assisted "thinking membrane" that would blanket the earth and contain all of humanity's thoughts and feelings.

But what De Chardin, a Jesuit priest, did not anticipate was that this membrane would be such big business.

Facebook is a "social network", sure, but it is also a mega-corporation. And like Google, the other digital colossus, it is a company that makes its money, largely, by studying users' behaviour and selling its findings to advertisers.

The way most people deal with this uncomfortable real-world truth is - in my experience - to ignore it. We know what Facebook is, but we continue to view our little corner of it as a thorny but relatively secret garden where we can create and communicate with abandon. Which is why Zuckerberg is a figure of such fascination and derision. Remembering him breaks that illusion.

It is only natural that a paranoid fire occasionally crackles through the timelines.

I think it safe to assume that by now most of us have seen the post that starts, "I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future ... " and ends: "Do not share. Copy and paste this to your timeline."

Nowadays people - read: more sophisticated users - reserve a special kind of ridicule for those who post the so-called Facebook Hoax, but the bogus disclaimer (now apparently in its third iteration) says something important about the conflicting desires that play out on the site - in this case, wanting the attention of more and more people while fearing unwanted attention.

"We like to speak about Facebook as something 'other', and pretend to look at it from the outside, when in fact we have all created it," says Wendy Cain, a Johannesburg-based clinical psychologist. Cain is working on a PhD that looks at how people interact with technology, from a psychoanalytic point of view.

"There are so many 'human condition' reasons for Facebook's existence that it is almost over-determined," she says.

"Facebook gives us the opportunity to engage with information, people and even experiences while denying our curiosity and aggression. I think it speaks fundamentally to the tension that we all hold - in our desire for distance and our desire for closeness."

A variant of this tension seems to haunt the argument between Facebook's executives and their critics over who is responsible for Trump's win.

In the critics, I can't help but hear a heartbroken child telling a parent that if the parent had been watching more closely, the child's sibling wouldn't have broken the toy they shared. Which is understandable, considering that the shared toy is a country and there is evidence for the first child to support its case.

But of course that same child, only a few months ago, was complaining that the parent was being overly interfering.

This is simply the natural shape of the tussle we have with those who hold power over us, whether it is a parent, Facebook or the government. We demand a laissez-faire approach until circumstances turn against us and we need protecting.

A book could be written about all the different kinds of Facebook users. Some use it to spread lies, some to keep up with distant friends. Activists in Tunisia and Egypt famously used it to organise themselves during the Arab Spring. I use it mainly to make jokes about mannequins.

None of the metaphors - "hive", "notice board", even "community" - works fully because not even the executives in Menlo Park, California, know what Facebook is, or does, anymore.

It's like Frankenstein's monster (another metaphor): it has come alive. Facebook is a business and a network; a gallery where we curate our personalities; a playground where we toy with friendship and conflict; a vast screen onto which we project our anxieties about what it means to be a person in a world with other people.

Something is happening: a membrane of sorts is forming - fitfully, painfully - and Facebook is part of its lurching growth.

A lot of people say (and you hear them say it increasingly on the site itself) that Facebook is a "waste of time". "Why did I even open Facebook?" a friend of mine posted as his status update the other day.

But it is only a waste of time in the sense that reading, writing and communicating with other people is ever a waste of time. We all do all these things, and through doing them we learn about ourselves and others, and about ourselves in relation to others.

As with any resource, the more critical and self-reflexive we can be about how we use it, the better. The more we are prepared to see how it reflects back at us what Cain calls "our choices and frailties", the less power it has over us.

Facebook, in and of itself, cannot open or close our minds. Nor our hearts, for that matter. But it certainly gives us lots of opportunities to do either.

Not for the first time in the history of human technology, the best tool we have for connecting with each other only magnifies how difficult that task really is.

Browde is the author of 'The Relatively Public Life of Jules Browde', published by Jonathan Ball