As might be the case with a long familiar neighbor, we find ourselves surprised to discover that Facebook is 20 years old. In this case, we’re surprised that Facebook is so young since it seems that it has always been around. The company began in 2004. In those 20 years it has grown rapidly and expanded from a service aimed at university students in the United States to a service offered to the whole world. We might also be puzzled about what exactly we are celebrating after these 20 years.
What is Facebook? Facebook is both a company and a product. The company is fairly well known, the subject of scholarly and journalistic books, as well as a film.[1] The company, with a strong stock market valuation, has added new divisions, renaming itself Meta. Facebook is both well known and widely used, yet little understood. “For an astonishing number of people around the globe, Facebook has become such a common part of everyday life that they barely stop to think about its role.”[2] In the words of Andrew Bosworth, one of its executives, Facebook exists “to connect people”[3] and it does a very good job of that. To make those connections, unlike some other social media sites, Facebook requires users to show their real names, one of the reasons cited for its success. Their connection to Facebook seems as natural to its users as their own day-to-day identity.
This article will consider Facebook, the product, as a communication medium, attempt to understand its nature by applying a traditional communication paradigm, attempt to understand its activity through its unintended consequences, and finally offer some reflections on how Facebook has changed the media world.
A Communication Entity
Understanding what Facebook is is not simply a matter of familiarity but of understanding something that touches on the very nature of communication. As a communication medium, Facebook is both new and not new. It was not the first social networking site nor did social networking come into existence with the Internet. People have long cultivated groups of friends, kept up with their lives, planned things together, talked about their neighbors, checked on fashions, and so on – all those things that one can engage in on Facebook. The history of the company readily acknowledges the places where many of the fundamental Facebook ideas come from, but Facebook has managed to integrate things better and to respond to users’ needs more quickly.[4]
From a communication perspective, applying McLuhan’s four laws of the media[5] gives us a clearer sense of how to position Facebook and to understand its impact. Every new medium, McLuhan argues, enhances, reverses, retrieves, and makes obsolete some prior communication form. This applies to Facebook as much as to radio, television or the Internet. Facebook enhances social connections, both one’s personal connections and the very idea of social connection, by adding scale, speed, new ways to connect, and new topics for connection. But that very scale reverses the process, slowing it down by making it impossible to keep up with or track the billions of other users and accept previously unknown individuals and even companies as one’s more personal connections. Facebook retrieves features from earlier media, such as belonging to a tribe,[6] receiving the news, writing letters, hearing sales information, participating in fandom (a neologism indicating groups that share a passion), sharing media, blogging, and similar activities.[7] Finally, Facebook makes some traditional media forms obsolete, such as postal mail deliveries, face-to-face contact and newspapers.
If this describes how Facebook (the product) relates to other media, then what is Facebook exactly? After wrestling with the question, Bucher, in effect, throws up her hands and writes, “Facebook is Facebook.”[8] She has a point since Facebook in its 20 years has evolved, reinvented itself, drawn in other media, and extended its activities to connect people. It has continually been adapted, using the vast amount of data it gathers from its users to provide, in its view, a better experience for those users.[9]
A timeline for Facebook[10] lists the product changes the company has introduced in its 20 years, many of which will be very familiar, even defining, for its users, to the point that some might wonder how Facebook existed without them. Facebook began in 2004 as a web page. It added features and only shifted to an app for mobile phones in 2011-2013, eight years after Apple introduced the iPhone. More or less chronologically, Facebook grew by adding these features: names and contacts, photos, tagging photos, the Wall (the landing page where users can post items for others to see and to use content of interest), a social graph of the connections among friends; Facebook Notes (blogging), the News Feed (a list of information about Facebook friends and algorithmically chosen material judged to interest users), the Facebook Platform (specifications for developers to build applications on the Facebook interface and to connect web pages, for example, with Facebook), Facebook Beacons (an advertising system), Facebook Credits (enabling financial exchanges and payments), the Like button, the ability to tag friends in their status updates and comments, community pages (pages containing external content), Open Graph (a mapping of the interests of those people a user knows), mobile Facebook (the app for mobile phones), video chat, the Facebook Timeline, Facebook Exchange (a bidding system for advertising), emoticons, DeepFace (a face recognition system to identify faces in photos), the Newswire, Facebook instant messaging, content moderation, and Facebook Live, as well as the acquisition of companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and others offering structural support for analytics and data storage. As a product, Facebook spreads out across ways that connect people and their interests. To be on Facebook means that a person is connected and, for many, Facebook is the Internet. As a company Facebook aggressively defends its ways of connecting people and acquires its competitors or their employees to maintain its position in people’s lives. Facebook is a challenge to understand because, constantly changing, it has become many things.
To make more sense of all these features, Bucher and others suggest a number of metaphors for Facebook. It is a public space that seems intimate; it is a town square and a living room; it is an implementation of the open Internet; it is a community; it is a public broadcasting entity; it is a phone book; it is a news source; it is a post office; it is a utility; it is a platform.[11] Facebook is a media environment, an ecosystem where all manner of communication practices and devices interact; it is a general purpose connection device. These metaphors remind us that Facebook has made itself as flexible as it can to serve as many users as it can, for in addition to being a product, Facebook is also a company with the need to expand the number of users and to grow. And it did grow, moving from 70,000 users in 2004 to 1.8 billion in 2016.[12]
Understanding Facebook: Uses and gratifications categories
Another way to make some sense of Facebook is to apply a traditional communication research model to it. The uses and gratifications approach, used in one form or another in communication research since the 1940s,[13] investigates the proposition that people make use of communication media for different reasons but always to satisfy some need. The method, originally developed for radio and television, allows academics to investigate why people use each new medium. While researchers have discovered many reasons, they have tried to reduce them to a handful of key categories. Typical needs include general information seeking, decisional utility (that is, looking for help in making a decision in voting, purchasing a product, or choosing some option), entertainment, interpersonal utility, and parasocial interaction (connecting with or following actors, personalities, or even fictional characters).
The categories certainly apply to Facebook and provide a sense of its scope. People use it to accomplish many goals and to satisfy many needs. As an open platform, it gives its users (and content partners) great freedom to engage in many kinds of communication. Information seeking ranks highly, with people sharing personal news, keeping in touch with family and friends; locating other people, reconnecting with former school friends, work colleagues, and social contacts. Such information seeking performs a surveillance role as users track both their environments and the people in those environments. Facebook is also a source of news, not only about friends and companies, but also about local, national and international affairs – for many, Facebook is their first source of breaking news. Different from the usual uses and gratifications categories, information-seeking via Facebook overlaps with the interpersonal utility category, since much of the information people seek has to do with others – gossip provides a big part of Facebook content. But the interpersonal utility includes more. Facebook is a means to organize groups and activities; it is a means to provide information about and connection with business, religious, school, or recreational groups. Here, too, the categories overlap since Facebook offers great resources for parasocial interaction. One need not know one’s Facebook friends; indeed many seem to find great satisfaction in following the lives of celebrities.
Decisional utility plays a role in Facebook use. People attempt to raise consciousness about a variety of issues; companies employ it as a marketing and sales platform; governments and nonprofit organizations use Facebook pages to guide people’s decisions on health, recreation, science, and other areas. Political groups use Facebook to educate, persuade, or even deceive voters. People seek guidance from support groups dedicated to almost every issue; Facebook offers informal sources of information on health, science, religion and politics, and serves as a newsletter.
Finally, people use Facebook for entertainment. On Facebook, this overlaps with other categories of gratification, since interpersonal uses entertain through observing the lives of others. Facebook is also a game platform; it is a collection of fans; it is a means of self-expression; it is a way to pass the time.
In short, in terms of the uses and gratification categories of communication research, Facebook appears as a kind of non-traditional communication medium. Where past research has fairly easily analyzed people’s engagement with television, for example, Facebook makes it more difficult to sort out motivations. That has a sense of reality to it since Facebook seemingly provides anything that people want. And people’s motivations are seldom clearly defined.
Unintended Consequences
These overlapping uses appear in other ways as well. As a general communication tool, Facebook, not surprisingly, has direct and indirect effects, intended and unintended consequences. With so many users and so many features, some confusion about motivations for participation and interpretations of guidelines is almost inevitable. What worked with a relatively homogeneous group of college students, originally linked only to those at their own universities, did not work with a much more diverse, let alone worldwide, group of people. In addition to this, Facebook, the company, began with a rather benign attitude towards its users, underestimating the degree of bad behavior. Throughout his history of the company, Levy makes the point that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, trusted people and did not readily anticipate bad behavior. And so, throughout its history, features of Facebook led both to great commercial success and to growing criticism.
For example, Facebook, the product, began as a forum for sharing among friends and Facebook, the company, committed itself to freedom of expression.[14] That direct goal, along with the desire to connect people, led to its intended free expression of ideas and an unintended rise of misinformation, bullying, hate speech, harassment, inappropriate photos, and bad behavior. “As its user population grew, there were more problems with the content they were sharing.[15] Early on in its history, by 2005, the company began to develop content guidelines. Within two years U.S. state governments began to pressure the company to monitor content and to remove pornography, particularly any threats to children. As Facebook’s open registration allowed users from all over the world, different governments, which did not share the U.S. commitment to free speech, weighed in about content (often political) banned in their own countries. Questions about inappropriate content remain to this day.
In another example, the company’s desire to improve the user experience led to the collection of large amounts of data and an accompanying focus on data analytics. These gave the company the ability to offer recommendations in the news feed, from items about friends to advertising. From early in the company’s history, it collected data about its users, much of it routine. Later features, especially the Like button (encouraging people to show approval by a simple click, even on non-Facebook pages) allowed Facebook, the company, to collect data about their users’ contacts, their friends on Facebook, and their friends who were not on the platform.[16]
Facebook’s policy of encouraging their users to share information – in fact, the company built its whole product model not on creating content but on letting, indeed requiring, the users to create the content – led to an open attitude to data privacy. The data collected allowed the company to profile its users, an extremely important asset since such profiles helped to target advertising.
Another indirect effect of data collection and profiling for directing advertising has proved a valuable resource for an unintended field: political campaigns in the U.S. and other countries. Facebook generally took a hands-off approach to political advertising, even misinformation, due to its commitment to free expression; the company allowed greater latitude to political speech.[17] Because it encouraged information sharing, Facebook, the product, became an important source of political information and the company felt that it should not intervene.
Bucher argues that this has created several important but indirect political roles for Facebook. First, “Facebook has become a central part of electoral and party politics, its role in political campaigning, and… [its potential ] to influence voter behavior.” Second, “Facebook is used to organize political protests, mobilize social movements, or mediate political activism.” Third, “Facebook is utilized as a disinformation machine or … is used by authoritarian regimes to curtail said protests, control populations, and, in some cases, has led to atrocities.” And fourth, “Facebook is governed by the law and … in turn governs its use by way of its policies and standards.”[18] The company did not intend to become a political tool but has become one.
The extent of another indirect effect appeared only when it involved privacy and politics. In December 2015 The Guardian reported “how stolen Facebook profiles were used in the Cruz [an American politician] campaign.”[19] While the details of how a developer and content partner obtained and manipulated the data are somewhat convoluted, most people immediately understood the lack of privacy protection. Facebook, the company, had changing attitudes to privacy because its original model assumed that people wanted their information – from preferences to relationship status to Likes – to be known; only later did the product let people make conscious choices about which information to protect. But those choices did not affect the profiles nor the personality summaries based on them. Most users assumed greater privacy protection than existed and most neither anticipated nor understood how their own information could open them to persuasion and manipulation. While the company had a better sense of what it could do, at least with advertising, it did the minimum necessary to protect its user information.
Other privacy risks appeared at the very heart of Facebook. Openness about information forms a potentially dangerous part of the enterprise. Facebook, the product, encouraged open sharing and some features, such as the News Feed or the Open Graph, help users to track their friends and to find out what they are doing. The features connect to people’s desires to gossip, to find entertainment in others’ activities, to link themselves to others, to stay current, and even to practice a kind of surveillance of their environments. On the one hand, this seems like a congenial way to stay in touch and reflects the company’s intention to connect people; on the other, this ability to track other people enables stalking and other troublesome behaviors. In fact, when Facebook, the company, first introduced the News Feed, users renamed the product, “Stalker-book.”[20]
A final example of an indirect effect comes with the company’s stated desire to connect people, which led to Facebook’s user expansion, not only in the U.S., but throughout the world. That international expansion had the unintended consequence of revealing the lack of intercultural knowledge and understanding the company possessed, which led to tragedy in Myanmar where users new to the Internet and to Facebook quickly believed postings that encouraged the persecution of minority populations.[21]
Almost every one of the Facebook ideas – connecting people, populating their news feeds with information about friends, tracking what people were doing, recommending products – led to the need to fix something unintended. In some ways this is a result of the Facebook company’s practice of trying out new ideas as quickly as possible, a consequence of their informal motto, “Move fast and break things.”[22] These unintended consequences result not only from company shortsightedness but also from a new communication medium whose consequences people have not yet completely understood.
A Changing Media World
Facebook is one of the key players in changing communication, largely through enhancing social connections by adding scale, speed, and ways to connect. It did that relatively rapidly over the last 20 years and, in effect, helped to invent and foster a new way of being friends and of engaging in social interaction.
One need not be a doomsayer to see some truth in a listing of negative societal effects stemming from this new communication arrangement. Much of the investigative writing about Facebook has focused on the effects of such a powerful social network. Jamal Sanad Al-Suwaidi lists some, both negative and positive, though he admits that these characterize all social networks, not just Facebook. These include: a disintegration of non-digital social contacts and a loss of familial ties as social focus moves online; changing social values through exposure to many different ideas; cultural transformations; a sense of isolation; a dependence on the digital world for satisfying emotional needs; the growth of a virtual community; cognitive disparity and an impact on education; the growth of a knowledge economy; new business models; an increase of cross-border trade; and an openness to different groups.[23] What might explain such a wide range of social effects?
The rapid increase in the numbers involved helps to explain Facebook’s mixed effects. To have potentially so many social connections and to listen in on the connections of strangers leads to a lack of context or confused contexts for interactions. This affected social cues, norms and behaviors that traditionally regulated human interaction developed over many years and rested on one’s social groups. Facebook’s scale removes the checks on behavior developed from face-to-face contact.
Similarly, the lack of context makes people more vulnerable to misinformation, more prone to bullying and being bullied, less inhibited from expressing hate speech directed at strangers, readier to believe even outlandish things, such as conspiracy theories, and less able to balance the challenges to mental health from so much unfiltered information.
A loss of privacy also stems from social scale. People generally accept a loss of privacy in their families and immediate social groups; with some humor, people recognize that small towns lack privacy. But few anticipated making so much available to so many, much less the stripping away through the analysis of vast amounts of data a reliance on psychological defenses, self-esteem, and even justifications for one’s actions.
In these areas and in these ways, Facebook, both product and company, has indirectly redefined human friendship and the how friendship works, and perhaps even human contact. It makes its version of human friendship easy, sending and receiving updates for all simultaneously, and anchoring what Simanowski calls the “affective-computing” industry.[24] This happens because Facebook, the product, reorients people’s relationships to one another and their relationship to social space as well as to time. It does not matter where people find themselves physically because their virtual world of social space matters more. So does their virtual time: Facebook constantly reminds its users to check on their friends or to pass the time by playing the same games as their friends or even suggesting how they might waste time.[25] Facebook defines the shape of users’ lives.
The failure to completely map Facebook with the uses and gratifications model shows how Facebook differs from other communication media. It does everything that other media do, but with a key difference. Facebook is a more intimate medium than radio, television, or film, all of which – no matter how immersive they may be in narrative, sound or image – interpose a recognizable communication medium between user and content. Because Facebook trades on intimacy, users easily conflate motives for communication: information seeking becomes a parasocial relationship; surveillance becomes stalking; interpersonal utility becomes entertainment; even friendship takes on a parasocial quality as the platform subtly intervenes in people’s lives. These overlapping uses and gratifications make Facebook, the product, harder to understand and explain as a communication medium. Facebook’s wide-ranging yet forced intimacy and its overlapping uses may also help to explain some of the platform’s unintended consequences. The very algorithms connecting users amplify everything, further confusing boundaries as well as the social rules developed in a face-to-face environment. How can anyone anticipate consequences with so many changing elements?
Facebook both reflects changes in society and helps cause them. Simanowski summarizes it in this way: “Through its invitation to a kind of experience of the self that is reflexively impoverished, it produces the very subjects who are no longer dismayed by this process. This locates it within the trend of affirmative social relations, which it simultaneously promotes. Facebook is as popular as it is because it makes it possible to love the society we have.”[26]
What is Facebook, then? Employing another metaphor, we could propose that Facebook, the product, is a mirror that reflects who we are, in all our our complexity, wonder, and even sinfulness.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32009/22072446.1124.12
[1]. Cf. T. Bucher, Facebook, Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2021; D. Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010; R. Krasnow, “In Your Feed: Books About Facebook’s History & Influence”, in New York Public Library (www.nypl.org/blog/2021/02/04/facebook-booklist), February 4, 2021; S. Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story, New York, Blue Rider Press, 2020. Moreover, Bucher lists more than 400 scientific publications, while Levy’s more journalistic approach includes 30 pages of bibliography.
[2]. T. Bucher, Facebook, op. cit., 75.
[3]. S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., 441.
[4]. Cf. ibid., ch. 7-13.
[5]. Cf. M. McLuhan – E. McLuhan, Laws of Media. New Science, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988.
[6]. “a social, economic, and political entity including families connected by kinship” (J. S. Al Suwaidi, From Tribe to Facebook: The Transformational Role of Social Networks, Abu Dhabi, Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 2013, 12).
[7]. Cf. Ibid., 22 f.
[8]. T. Bucher, Facebook, op. cit., 3.
[9]. Cf. S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., ch. 16.
[10]. Cf. Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook); S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., ch. 7-13.
[11]. Cf. T. Bucher, Facebook, op. cit., 35; 51 f.
[12]. Cf. Wikipedia, op. cit.
[13]. Cf. P. Palmgreen – L. A. Wenner – J. D. Rayburn, “Relations Between Gratifications Sought and Obtained: A Study of Television News”, in Communication Research 7 (1980/2) 161-192.
[14]. Cf. S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., 111; 246 f.
[15]. Ibid., 246.
[16]. Cf. ibid., 205 f.
[17]. Cf. T. Bucher, Facebook, op. cit., 161.
[18]. Ibid., 165.
[19]. S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., 418.
[20]. Cfr T. Bucher, Facebook, op. cit., 108.
[21]. Cf. ibid., 188-194.
[22]. S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., 6.
[23]. Cf. J. S. Al-Suwaidi, From Tribe to Facebook…, op. cit., 66-74.
[24]. Cf. R. Simanowski, Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves, New York, Columbia University Press, 2018, XVIII.
[25]. Cf. S. Levy, Facebook…, op. cit., 165.
[26]. R. Simanowski, Facebook Society…, op. cit., XIV f.
