Anti-Social Media

Subtitled 'how Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy', this is a timely and hugely informative contribution to recent debates on data and privacy. After the introduction arguing that the problem with Facebook is Facebook, the remaining seven chapters characterise its function in terms of various types of machine – pleasure machine, surveillance, attention, benevolence, protest, politics and disinformation. The author makes it clear how the original intentions were idealistic in terms of connecting people, but we are embedded in a competitive economic context where we become the products and our data is fed into a vast commercial system with 2.2 billion subscribers. This needs to be understood in the context of the attention economy, where different devices and platforms compete for our attention, which is progressively fragmented - the author likens this to snacking rather than having a proper meal. In addition, the Internet in general and Facebook in particular act as amplifiers of human trends and capacities based on eliciting an immediate emotional response rather than cultivating a culture of deliberation. One example is the erosion of truth and trust, and the author shows how this reflects the very nature of Facebook itself: 'if you wanted to build a machine to distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energise hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook.' (p. 19)

The five most powerful digital companies in the world – Facebook, Alphabet (the holding company for Google) Microsoft, Amazon and Apple are all engaged in providing us with a 'life operating system' involving 24- hour content and capacity, effectively monitoring our activities and states of being and guiding our purchasing decisions. A good deal of attention is devoted to political issues, including the role of mobile devices in the Arab spring and meddling with national elections through psychologically targeted ads (in addition to the Russian issue, the Trump campaign was spending $70 million a month on Facebook). The author cautions in attributing causal powers to technology, arguing rather that they serve as channels of communication reflecting prevalent social trends. In his conclusion, he shows how this kind of social connectedness has not enabled us to tackle major challenges, although petition sites have made a constructive contribution. Innovation does not in itself entail progress, especially in thinking through problems together – this means that we will have to rely on other channels, also to challenge the dominance of technology and consider how best to regulate and reform our 'information ecosystem'. Essential reflective reading.