Life on automatic: Facebook's archival subject

• Published in: First Monday Vol. 19; no. 2
• Main Author: Mitchell, Liam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 03.02.2014
• Subjects: Ontology; Philosophy; Social networks; User behaviour
• ISSN: 1396-0466; 1396-0466
• DOI: 10.5210/fm.v19i2.4825

Facebook’s ideology rests on and results in a particular ontology: Mark Zuckerberg wants the site to help create an “open” and “connected” world.  This article explains the implications of this world-changing mission by examining services that map the Facebook user’s path across the Internet (like Connect) and archive the user’s life (like Timeline).  Reading these services through the psycho-ontological claims of Baudrillard and Derrida suggests that Facebook’s open, connected individual – the archival subject – is bent towards convenience and interest.  Pairing these readings with a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology in terms specific to Facebook, the article argues that the archival subject provides evidence of a view of the world characterized predominantly by an orientation toward browsing rather than use or control.  Facebook should be analyzed in terms of this pre-theoretical understanding of the world – one that it both symptomatizes and institutes.  In advancing this argument, the article calls attention to the broader (ontological) and more intensive (subjective) correlates of more traditional (politico-economic or ideological) criticisms of social media.