Facebook as Emotion and Action

2013

Literally every ‘face’ is a ‘book’. Every new ‘friend’ (face) has many chapters (book) of relation. But considering from the standpoint of theories, the last word becomes a profound metaphoric condensation of the multiple forces that are functioning in the formation of networked individuation and community. In other words, it is a play of innumerable signs in bizarre network of textuality. In an age which has reached the height of complexity in technology, in economics, and in human sciences, any phenomenon, especially technological one, cannot be seen merely at the level of literary tropes. Facebook is basically and actually a complex articulation at the cross-roads of technology, culture and capitalism in their newest heights. The purpose of this essay is to strategically contemplate on the issues of the status of Facebook as textuality across www; the question of authorship of the users; and finally, the question of subjectivity and agency along the line of post-structural/post-m...

Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 2015

The current use of Facebook has developed a series of changes in the agents' communication practices. This article identifies the solid changes that have occurred from a students' population in one public school in Bogotá. The following research gathered data from participants' Facebook Wall and in-depth interviews in order to highlight these transformations. This research was framed within a qualitative approach and phenomenological methodology. The results showed that for the majority of this student group, Facebook became an affective prosthesis, which allowed users to virtualize their emotions linguistically within the dynamics of a linguistic market.

2011

With little exaggeration, the 21 st century could be called - the network era. The use of socia l networks has begun to dominate human lives. Parallel with this domination, there is continuous debate on the upsetting effects of the soc ial networks. That is why Facebook will be the central analysis of this subject related to th e psychology of the social networks and differences in a multicultural society such as ours. The Case was the Republic of Macedonia and the Critical event was: the incident at Skopje's Kale Fortress where the rival fan groups 'Komiti' from one (ethnic Macedonian) side and 'Sverceri' and citizens of the Fortress's vicinity from the other (ethnic Albanian ) side clashed and the police could not prevent the close contact between the supporters and opponent s of the construction of the Church-Museum building. The analysis shows that the real war with words was on Facebook. New sites dedicated to the Museum-Church at Kale Fortress were bein...

2014

The year 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the launch of Facebook, the most ubiquitous social media and communication platform in the world. It also gives us the opportunity to take a step back and examine increasingly important questions about how Facebook and the new social web have impacted the world of communication, from debate, discourse and rhetoric to philosophy, politics, social context, and other forms of new media. Has Facebook been constructive or disruptive in these different areas – or perhaps both? How does the ease and ubiquity of online communication affect longstanding national, generational, ideological, gender and class divides? These and similar questions are explored by the conference participants.

Paul Levinson lists Facebook, along with the blogosphere, Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Digg and Twitter, as a new “new medium”. There is no doubt that that is true, but only part of a whole truth. From a technical point of view the Internet consists of few layers, starting from the layer of physical medium as cables and routers, ending with the application layer, that let us chat, read emails or view internet sites. Global popularity of Facebook giving an easy way not only to share content, but also to integrate external sites with it brought nowadays a new layer of the global network about — a meta-application layer. After Microsoft, Apple, and Google, the company makes a following element in the chain of commercial agents that gradually formed the way we use computer mediated communication today. This “facebookisation” of the Internet has several cultural ramifications, some of which I would like to examine in my paper. One of them could be a claim that it finally put into practice the idea of Web 2.0 and spread it into masses. Even though such technical possibilities existed already for a long time, it has never been so easy to create someone's own site (in a form of fan-page) or just embed a discussion forum provided by Facebook at an external site. Facebook provided easy tools to create a secondary social net over primary net of WWW. In Henry Jenkins' terms one could utter that the threshold of participation has finally gotten low enough. Therefore almost all currently created internet sites make part of truly interactive network of Web 2.0, allowing for fully bilateral communication. One of the consequences of the latter happened to be something we could call an “eruption of privacy”, an avalanche of passport-like photos accompanied by names and surnames and other personal data, a genuine great book of faces, a census. This fact alone has a lot of exciting effects, I'd deeper get into two of them. The first one could express sententiously: if you are not public, you are not reliable. It's much more that fifteen minutes of fame promised by Andy Warhol: it's an informal obligation to be present with your true name and surname somewhere in the Net. Otherwise, one's possible future employer or collaborator can perceive you as unsociable and alienated person at best and as fake personality at worst. Welcome to the brave new world, where everyone is to play a role of a celebrity and her own paparazzi in the same time. The second one, paradoxically enough, is that the principle “Make it all public!”, imposed by a big companies, gives a powerful arm to fight with big companies. Since everything and everyone must be on Facebook, that from its essence yields two-sided, symmetrical communication channels, every user can speak with a big company and the company spokesman has no choice but to answer it in a proper way.

O compartilhamento na Rede Social: Facebook e processos de construção da identidade, 2016

A atual organização social é caracterizada pelos novos meios de comunicação digital, que ultrapassam fronteiras geográficas e sociais. O sucesso das redes sociais digitais é fruto de um contexto mercadológico, que reflete aos novos bens de consumo – como celulares e internet de ponta, ao mesmo tempo em que acompanha a rotina humana cada vez mais objetiva, que anseia pela praticidade e economia de tempo. Além de serem promotoras de suas próprias ideias nas redes sociais, as pessoas também compartilham ideias de outras em seus próprios perfis, em busca de visibilidade – que também pode ser compreendido por likes (ou curtidas). Mas qual é o real motivo do compartilhamento de postagens de outras pessoas? Em que ponto ele constroi a identidade do sujeito? Tornar público o pensamento de uma outra pessoa diz sobre o processo da formação da própria identidade? Esse trabalho busca essas respostas por meio de uma pesquisa divulgada no Facebook, maior rede social do mundo, com os usuários desta mídia, sobre os motivos pelos quais eles compartilham ideias em seus próprios perfis públicos.

Comunicar

One of the «black holes» of academic research in Communication is the shallowness of reflections on the classic origins of Communication, its aims and points of entry. In this respect, the study of communicative processes on the Internet becomes particularly relevant (specifically the social networks processes) when observed from the classic rhetorical perspective. We focus on the use of persuasion strategies (ethos, pathos, logos) as well as the abundant use of rhetorical figures. Such parameters, along with the resources that emergent technologies offer, unleash creativity and afford humanist aspects to network communication. These give on-line platforms an extremely persuasive strength. Thus, we may speak of the network user of the 21st century as the new «Rhetorician». Our research on Facebook addresses the presence of rhetoric in online social network communication: the user of these platforms applies communicative strategies described by the Rhetoricians dating back to Greco-Roman antiquity. The methodology in this work (the study of three typified cases and the content analysis of conversations generated on Facebook walls) allows us to intertwine rhetoric and communication today, mediated by the emergence of online networks. We propose the retrieval of certain parameters of deep, critical thought to the benefit of a more human communication.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2022

According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our “social media malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper will argue that we continually refrain from the very question(ing) that would call these companies to account: what does the algorithm desire? In approaching this question, this article will draw from Lacan’s ‘hysterical’ position in accordance with Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity. Together, these concepts will be used to provide a psychoanalytic account of how our subjectivization in social media renders an unconscious endorsement that both frames our awareness of the dilemmas encompassing social media, while also positing an inherent limitation that may offer a possible path out of its impeding affects. This subjective ambivalence – delegated yet reluctantly disavowed – offers an opportunity to realign discussions on the lost object of desire (objet a) and its reproduction in social media algorithms. In so doing, the case will be made that an account of interpassivity can help lay bare the hysterical significance underscoring our digital subjectivization.