The Truth About Facebook

releasing a new feature. The benign-sounding News Feed immediately provoked sinister comparisons: it was "Big Brother mode" or the "Super Stalker feature."

I wasn't bothered at all. To me, the protest seemed petty. Indeed, I felt vindicated. Over the past year and a half, I've resisted joining Facebook. Wasn't the News Feed simply making explicit that which has always been implicit in the Facebook experience?

The events of the last week and a half have compelled me to develop my until-recently inarticulate discomfort with Facebook into a coherent critique. From my vantage point, the News Feed didn't do anything new so much as it forced us to confront Facebook's rather unsettling subtext spelled out in neatly arranged headlines. It is not as much about privacy as one might expect. Instead, my criticism is directed towards the way in which Facebook produces and structures social relations.

Let me explain.

Something caught my attention last week in J.D. Porter's recent article. He ironically called the Facebook outrage our generation's Vietnam. It's a cynical comparison which is both true, in some sense, and disgusting. Perceiving its emptiness and silliness, he mocks the self-righteous clicking of Facebook's petty protesters. But I think it is important to go beyond ridicule. Facebook is not the disease; rather, its trivialization of meaning and action are symptomatic of a greater sickness in our society.

The profile seems to be at the center of the Facebook experience. It is where you produce your Facebook identity. But what mode of identity production is this? What forms do social relations take from this mode of identity production? For me, Marx's concepts of commodity fetishism and alienation are helpful. Marx argues that capitalist society reduces all social relations to the commodity form. He was talking in an abstract way about what we might call our modern religion-consumerism. Capitalism deforms society and commodifies identity. We no longer seek fulfillment and meaning through people or action, we seek it through the consumption of commodities. This broad detachment-the social malaise and anxiety that arise out of commodity relations-Marx calls alienation.

Facebook seems to capture and crystallize the debasement of social relations which Marx describes. Your Facebook profile is a product, a brand, a commodity of identity-and mass marketability for peer consumption is the primary goal. You choose your picture, your personally branded logo, with which you capture in pixels your Facebook self. Then, as you progress down the list, you have important decisions, some more constricted than others. For instance, I can place myself anywhere along a political spectrum ranging from "very liberal" to "very conservative." My politics won't quite fit-I repeatedly feel boxed in and coerced. You can sell your self in a variety of ways, but on Facebook, only the mainstream seems marketable.

Voyeurism is one way to describe people's behavior on Facebook. Another way would be identity consumption. Facebook provides a unique arena for selfish shopping. We can browse through endless constructions of identity, compare prices on diverse narratives of self, and evaluate how people project status and mediate social and cultural norms. With a simple click, you can join activist, political, and religious Facebook groups-adding a colorful new advertising label to your brand. But rarely does this translate into thoughtful reflection, meaningful engagement, or action. The pictures, the music, the interests, the groups-essentially everything-seem hollow, richly symbolic but lacking all substance, completely alienated from reality. Along with its ease and convenience, Facebook trivializes, sterilizes, and commodifies human existence in a way which reflects the profound alienation of capitalist society.

So why the recent fury, the fierce indignation of a nation of Facebookers? It's hard to construe the issue to one of privacy-the information was all there before the News Feed. The outcry erupted because the new feature exposed, in a rather raw and unsentimental manner, how fake, shallow, self-interested, and hollow most activity on Facebook is. With all one's actions neatly compiled in a list, the pretense to authenticity vanished, the mythology of any real meaning or substance was crushed, and, in a moment, promiscuous identity consumption and production ground to a standstill.

Blissfully (thanks to a hard fought campaign), we are no longer confronted with the glaring exposure of the alienated intimacy and commodified identity of Facebook. But there is a choice: we can consciously strive for a society that is not based on commodification of the self, a structure of social relations that is engaged rather than alienated. Or we can log in and tune out.