Biography

Facebook Society is a passionate disavowal of contemporary digital sociality. In it, Roberto Simanowski mourns the loss of contemplative thinking, narrative skills, and reflection that the proliferation of social media has heralded. Bringing together philosophers, poets, and digital humanities scholars, Simanowski critiques the state of the contemporary self, and explores how it has been damaged by social media corporations. Although this might sound like a complaint with which readers are already familiar and perhaps tempted to dismiss, Simanowski's arguments are deeply sophisticated and thoroughly researched. Facebook Society adds some much-needed complexity to characterizations of social media as a degrading force, and Simanowski serves as an engaging intellectual antagonist to those of us who hold differing viewpoints. Ultimately, Simanowski goes beyond lamenting the changes wrought by networked technologies and asks what it means to be human in the digital age.

Simanowski draws deeply on German philosophy, applying historically influential modes of thought to contemporary problems. The value of this kind of [End Page 672] approach is that it takes urgent concerns that permeate thinking about digitally mediated modes of living and links them to older traditions and themes of human thought, illuminating new knowledge in the process. The book addresses enduring problems of the self: what the experience of living entails, what to do with the past, how to manage meaninglessness, and the relevance of others to our own sense of being. It takes these concerns and tracks ways of thinking about them from Homer through Goethe, Hegel, and Nietzsche, to Kafka and Baudrillard, and on to contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Marshall McLuhan, and Zygmunt Bauman. In historically tracking such central human preoccupations and applying them to contemporary digital contexts, Simanowski takes a big picture view to show what is human about the technologies we embed in our lives.

The overarching sentiment in this volume is one of loss. Simanowski positions practices of self-narration as skills that are being lost as life moves into digital realms dominated by instant sharing and visual modes of representation. As social technologies change the way we think, act, perceive, and remember, skills such as retrospection, introspection, self-narration, self-discovery, contemplation, conscious narration, memory, recollection, and verbal and written communication are becoming endangered. The preface introduces Simanowski's core object of critique: what he calls "Facebook society," the reigning form of sociality in the contemporary digital age, powered by various kinds of autobiographical records. This society is characterized by "mathematicised thinking," a form of logic that elevates numbers and subjugates language (xvii), resulting in the primacy of quantified value markers such as likes, shares, and follower counts, and by algorithms as structural coordinators. In losing language, Simanowski frets that to our detriment, we are losing a sense of meaning in our lives as well as valuable self-knowledge.

The book is structured into three chapters. Chapter one, "Stranger Friends," argues that contrary to popular belief, social media does not promote self-knowing, or even social connection. Rather, it provides an escape from existential pressures, and a salve for the post-modern subject. Simanowski positions "technologies of sharing" as "technologies of self-avoidance" (27). Equally distressing is the way such technologies are structured to facilitate avoidance of the present moment. Simanowski conducts in this chapter a fascinating investigation into what social media does to and with time. With particular attention to the sharing of photographs—a dominant practice on many platforms—Simanowski positions social media as serving the human need to cope with existence on a moment-to-moment level. He argues, "The social network proves to be a community of need, adversity, or affliction, a 'machine' for dealing with the present" (28). Simanowski's discussion suggests that the chief methods social networks adopt for "dealing with" the present include delegating experience, avoiding the present, and shielding users from being plagued by the possibility that there is no satisfactory answer to the question of what life is for (33). The argument...