Many of the people who claim that Facebook has become insignificant or uninteresting say so because they still think of Facebook as primarily a social network site or social medium, whatever that means. Let us think of it as one of the particularly prevailing myths about Facebook. There are many more. Some myths, such as the myth of Facebook in decline and the myth of Facebook as primarily a social medium, overlap. This is not to say that Facebook isn’t declining, or that it hasn’t lost its cool. To some users, Facebook has certainly lost its appeal. A Pew study on teens’ use of social media and technology, for example, showed that while 71% of US teens reported using Facebook in 2014–15, the numbers had declined to 51% in 2018 (Anderson and Jiang, 2018). Reports from the Scandinavian countries show a similar tendency among the younger generations. In Norway, for example, 81% of people aged 15 to 25 reported using Facebook on a daily basis in 2019, a decline of 12 percentage points from two years prior (Kantar, Forbruker and Media). Reports of shrinking user numbers notwithstanding, revenue and profit continue to rise. The earnings report of the first quarter 2020 showed a 17% revenue growth, which is considerable taken the onset of a global pandemic into account (Facebook, 2020a). In other words, despite numerous campaigns that have urged people to leave and quit Facebook, business has never been better.
Insignificance, then, is a highly relative term. While the main service, Facebook.com, might have become less important as a communication channel among Western elites and younger generations, Facebook is important in many other ways – even among the very people who feature in the headlines on Facebook’s apparent demise. As Sujon et al. found in a longitudinal study on Facebook use, it is not so much that Facebook has become meaningless to young people, but rather that its meaning has changed. While in 2013, users reported using Facebook mostly to connect with others, five years later the same respondents reported using Facebook mainly as a ‘personal service platform’ for coordinating events, archiving photos and for relationship maintenance (Sujon et al., 2018). In other words, teenagers still use Facebook, just not necessarily in the same ways that they used to, or in the way that their parents use Facebook for that matter. In a WIRED magazine story commemorating Facebook’s fifteenth anniversary, teenagers reported mostly using Facebook for controlling what their parents post. Under the headline ‘Teens Don’t Use Facebook, But They Can’t Escape It Either’, one of the teenagers explained that Facebook had just always been there, both in terms of playing an essential part in family life, and also in a more abstract sense as a felt presence: ‘Even before Jace could understand the concept of Facebook, he felt its influence every time his dad had him stop what he was doing and pose for photos that were destined to be shared online’ (Dreyfuss, 2019a). This notion of concept and felt presence is important and one of the reasons why Facebook cannot be easily dismissed.
Feeling Facebook
Invoking the feeling of Facebook, of its felt presence, confronts its alleged status as a social network site, social medium or platform. The memory of having to pose for your parents’ Facebook-friendly photos, or, as one of the speakers at an arts festival told the audience, the experience of ‘not being able to visit a new city without searching for the perfect new vertical cover photo for Facebook’, suggests that the question of what Facebook is and why it matters cannot be answered adequately by referring back to other high-order labels. The way in which Facebook touches the lives of so many, whether this touching is barely noticed or significantly sensed, attests to its atmospheric force. This book suggests that one of the ways in which we might understand Facebook is through notions of atmosphere, affect and imaginaries. More colloquially, atmosphere is used to describe the ambiance or feel of a place.
Scholars in human geography have taken up the term from Gernot Böhme’s writings on aesthetics (1993) as a way of theorizing the unique backdrop of everyday life (Anderson, 2009). According to Bille et al., atmospheres refer to the ‘spatial experience of being attuned in and through the material world’ (2015: 35). It’s a feeling of in-betweenness that cannot readily be attributed to either an object or subject, but needs to be thought of as something that emerges in an encounter between people and things and seems to fill a space with a certain tone or mood. What Jace is describing when he recounts growing up and posing for Facebook photos is essentially the experience of being attuned in certain ways rather than others. If, for Böhme (1993), atmospheres are about the perceived presence of something and their reality in space, we might think of Jace’s experience of growing up as a way of feeling the atmospheric force of Facebook. Stopping what he was doing in order to pose for his dad’s Facebook photo also became a way of being attuned to the meaning of family and a certain way of staging what a happy family life looks like.
Jace’s story is not unique. Most of us have felt the presence of Facebook in one way or another. There are the ways in which we dance and have fun in front of the camera in case it gets posted on Facebook as evidence of a good time, the strategic status updating to boost the sense of personal success, or the way in which we make sure others know that we voted. If we include Instagram, the Facebook-owned image-sharing app, many more examples come to mind. The felt presence of Facebook as a ‘family of apps’, consisting of Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, can be seen in the ways that restaurants make dishes appear ‘Instagram-worthy’ or the ways in families coordinate their daily routines and communicate in smaller groups using WhatsApp or Messenger. Bille et al. (2015) describe how architects and designers work to stage atmospheres, by intentionally shaping spaces for certain emotional responses. While the authors mainly have physical buildings in mind, Facebook, too, should be seen as a designed space that seeks to affect people’s moods and guide their behaviour for utilitarian and commercial purposes.
Beyond the pre-individual scales of measure, or intensities, that are often taken to be at the heart of how affect is theorized (Clough, 2008), the notion of feeling Facebook is very much part of the articulable realm. When people feel the presence of Facebook in their lives, it is not necessarily beyond discourse and conscious representation, as certain strands of affect theory would have it (Massumi, 1995). While the force of Facebook may be difficult to articulate, in terms of pointing to what exactly it is about Facebook that spurs a specific sensation or emotion, there is no denying the fact that Facebook means a lot to individuals, organizations and institutions alike. The presence of Facebook is felt everywhere, whether it is in the very real sense of threatening the livelihood and condition of an entire institution, such as journalism and the news industry, or more subtly as in the ways in which the health sector has to grapple with Facebook as an alternative information-seeking forum for patients. From the perspective of other businesses and organizations, Facebook means affected revenue streams, changing workflows, new job titles, opportunities for organizing protests, breaking and redefining news, a new political platform and regulatory challenges.
Far from being insignificant, then, Facebook matters. It matters because Facebook orients people. Following cultural theorist Sara Ahmed, we might say that Facebook’s