nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, Section 6,
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium And this is not all: identities are constantly evolving. At 15, fast and furious rebelion against one's parents is the thing to do, but at 30 this doesn't make very much sense - and if still the case, the symptom of something much more serious dooms up, typical a person whose growing-up process hasn't been particularly smooth. Our mates from primary school, at least those we haven't lost of sight altogether (only to find them back on Facebook of course) all remember a very much different persons. In the same vein, our first loves may in retrospect see us as the sunshine in their lives, while our ex-partner hates our guts because of the alimony that has to be vired every month. Which we repay in kind by showing only coldness and ill temper: love is over, everything's different, Baby! We change, we have changed and our social relations reflect the change that makes us alive. We'll give here a few examples to show how perverse are the mechanisms of fixed identity/identification that are proposed, or rather imposed, by Facebook. These examples, admitedly a bit simplified, and which we have set in the feminine gender, are unfortunately fast becoming, or have become, reality. Example 1, abusive dismissal: A very competent young female teacher, adored by her students, is filmed being seriously plastered at a party among friends. Explicit pics and clips are circulating in no time on Facebook, posted and reposted by 'friends' of 'friends' of 'friends' ... till they reach her director and the college's boeard. Upon which she is no longer allowed to apply for tenure, and gets a severe reprimand. Her plea that her private life has nothing to do with her work as teacher is dismissed, and she herself gets the sack for being a bad example to her students. Example 2, violence at home: A mother tries to protect her child against her violent husband, gets beaten up, and then raped in the process. After untold sufferings, she manages to escape her tormentor. She moves to another, far-away city and starts her life afresh, together with her son. Crisis over - so she thinks. But there is Facebook. Her tormentor finds her out, either simply by reading her messages, or by checking out on an application she sometimes uses, and which gives away the user's exact location. In order not to be found out, this woman, will have to close her acount, whatever she tries otherwise. In her case, being on Facebook can put her life in peril. Example 3, suicide: A young woman is capptured on video by 'friends' while she's cock-sucking her boy-friend in the college's toilet. The clip is instantly on line, and in no time everyone knows about her private, but now very public skills, which are profusely commented on Facebook. She tries to defend herself, switches educational institution, but to no avail: her new pals are also on Facebook, and are very well clued in on 'what kind of girl she is', thank you. She is constantly ridiculed, insulted and marginalised. You did it, so now you get what you deserve is the backdrop, but also often explicit attitude, which convinces her that her life is longer worth living. She slashes her arteries in her bathtub after having written 'I am not like that' on her Facebook wall.[28] (end of section 6) (section 7) Privacy no more. The ideology of radical transparency. Facebook, in its first five years of 'public' existence (2005 - 2010) has increasingly narrowed the private space of its users [29] Facebook centers its public relations drive around transparency, or even, radical transparency: 'our transparency with regard to machines shall make us free' [30]. We have already deconstructed the assertion that you can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self [31a]. The 'authentic self', however, is a tricky concept. Authenticity is a process whereby one is oneself with others, who in their turn, contribute to one's personnal development. It is not an established fact, fixed once and for all. But the 'faith' of/in Facebook is a blind faith, an applied religion, impervious to reason. Indeed: Members of Facebook's radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included, believe more visibility make us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarassing things. The assumption that transparency is inevitable was reflected in the launch of the News Feed in September 2006. It treated all your behaviour identically[...] [31b] The fact that 'behavioural' social networks and 'affinity' ones are merged together online, is, as we have seen before, the cause of serious problems in daily life, when not of very real dangers. Yet the merger is one of the main credo of Facebook, and this for very precise, commercial motives:
nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, Section 6,
Part One, Section 6, # 1. Public and Private, Ontology and Identity Is what is private also public? According to Facebook, everything private should tend towards becoming as public as possible. Public meaning of course managed by, published on, and made available through Facebook, a private enterprise. But the social networks to which an individual belong are not the same as her or his 'behavioural networks' (that of people sHe meets often, without them being 'friends', like parents, ofsprings, siblings, neighbours, etc. They do not correspond either with his/her on-line networks. Danah Boyd's writings in the matter are particularly clear [25]. The fundamental issue always remains the same: that of the personal ontology being created within a collective context. This is how Mark Zuckerberg thinks about it: You have one identity, he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, 'The Facebook Effect.' The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. He adds: Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. [26] We at Ippolita have always taken as a premise that identity is the place of difference, and this for biological, psychological, and cultural reasons we have already expounded [27]. With his moralism, Zuckergerg gives the impression he is about to cleave through the Gordian knot of mendacity, by asserting the necessity to have one identity, and one only, clear, and precise, so as not to lie to oneself and to others. Zuckerberg would like us to believe that he aims to reconstitute our identities, shattered in thousands fragments in our relentlessly competitive modern lives, and that he wants to give us back our lost (mythical) integrity. So he pushes us to elaborate a personal profile, reconciling, as in a succesful advertisement of ourselves: a hard working, hard playing personna, an affectionate familly man/woman, a luscious sexual subject, a spiritual and friendly me, a social and charitable character, and so forth. Facebok as the byword for specialised mass self-marketing. Abolishing identity is admittedly impossible. Just as it is impossible to abolish power. And we may be glad about that: it is what makes evolution, change, and communication possible. Identity needs to be managed, multiplied, altered, re-created - just like power needs to be. To communicate means to talk-write from out a specific place, that is to assume an identity, or to built up a knowledge-power. Writing is based on language, which is based on identity, which in its turn is based on power. Whichever are the means we use in order to communicate, we are already entangled in the negotiation of identities, both personal and collective. But social life, as practised today, flawed and pefectible as it may be, implies the possibility to circulate, at will, different versions of ourselves, resulting in different identities for others to repercuss, leading us to adjust ourselves to new social relationships. We are not 'the same person' to each and everyone. So the question is not about being able to access various level of depths within a single individual profile, but to be really different according to the prevailing situation. Despite this apparent incoherence, this is abolutely necessary and positive for us, in order to be in accordance with our own integrety. As we shall see later on in detail, it is important to spread out the knowledge-power, by strengthening the bonds with our loved ones, by establishing connexions where there were none before, by cutting off the dead wood. What definitely should not be done is to solidify the knowledge-power into a static identity by accumulating data whose association leads to a segmentation that is only commercially relevant, and has the personalisation of advertisements for sole purpose. In daily (real) life, we do not behave the same way in the presence of our parents as we do when we are with our children. We don't talk with our children about our prefessional problems, unless we want, for some reason, to make them feel they bear some responsability for them. And if we would talk about the same with our friends, we still would do that in a different manner. We are not going to parties together with our parents, and certainly not with the postman, even though we (used to -transl.) see him every morning. We don't have sex with our boss either (or at least, not everybody does). So why should sHe be our 'friend' on Facebook, for Chrissake, or, worse still, share the information which we reserve to our partner? Yet, the affection that bonds us to the members of our own family is no less the affection we feel towards our friends. And we spend most probably more time at work than enjoying our love life. This is simply because we have are faced with different types of relationships, within different social networks, each
