A virtual universe

In 2009, when the social networking website Facebook attained 150 million members, its boyish founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed, “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.” The virtual universe he created from dormitory all-nighters in Harvard University has now touched the magical record of one billion users. Facebook stands behind only India and China in population and could soon overtake them.
In a way, Facebook is more powerful than any of these countries it has been compared to because it poaches on people living everywhere and anywhere. Its one billion consumers come from almost all nation states, with the top five nationalities holding Facebook accounts haling from the United States, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico. It is a borderless concept that defies exclusive norms of citizenship, territory and sovereignty. The multicultural transnational connections and relationships fostered on the Facebook platform are the nearest one gets to haloed concepts like a “global village”.
What no empire could ever obtain through physical subjugation or economic strategy, a bunch of technology wunderkinds operating out of Menlo Park, California, did without application of coercion. The one billion users of Facebook have not been forced to join, but opted to do so because they saw advantages of being in rather than out of a new world where “friending” and gaming, “walls” and “likes” are the practices of relating to each other that are vanishing in the real world.
The astronomical growth of Facebook, from a start-up in 2004 into a repository of personal information and daily lives of one billion people, is a function of the breakdown of channels of actual socialisation and face-to-face communication that used to define groups and identities. Political scientist Robert Putnam has argued that television had already shattered civic associational culture in America after 1950 and turned its citizens into loners who did not commingle as much with their neighbours and fellow citizens.
The power of technological innovation to reshape who one meets, talks to and does what with, is an age-old one. Facebook is reaping the blowback effect of TV’s atomising effect, wherein humans are cooped up in their living rooms instead of moving about in their spare time to build “real” relationships. If the idiot box had reduced social institutions like the sport of bowling as a bonding exercise, Facebook is an antidote from a more advanced technological age to recreate what Mr Putnam and Co. call “social capital”. Instead of “bowling alone”, the so-called “Fbers” are chatting and sharing data in intersecting circles of intimacy.
In politics, we have become familiar with the notion of “Facebook revolutions” and how information exchange in real time has transformed the meaning of mass mobilisation. If collecting a crowd to demand the overthrow of a government or the repeal of unpopular laws took days or weeks in the pre-Web 2.0 phase of digital history, today it has an instantaneous ring that privileges spontaneity rather than top-down means of political organisation. The apparent leaderless and horizontal quality of mass movements is accelerating thanks to Facebook’s integration into ubiquitous mobile phones. Six hundred million of the one billion FBers are accessing their accounts from hand-held smartphones enabled with Internet connectivity. Together with other micro-blogging mediums like Twitter, Facebook is an on-the-move service that gives the downtrodden (and their oppressors) greater flexibility with which to plan their next moves to achieve their political goals.
There are, of course, detrimental consequences of Facebook’s phenomenal rise. From school and university students to workers in offices, maladies of excess surfing on Facebook and wastage of time are being reported. Grades in college and productivity at the workplace are suffering due to Facebook entertainment overkill, leading educational institutions and employers to restrict access to the number one destination for schmoozing. While some view Facebook mania as a supervisory problem rather than an inherent flaw of social networking, the sheer addictive quality of searching for lost friends or like-minded individuals and groups is such that it can never be fully controlled. If China’s “Great Firewall” banned Facebook and still failed to prevent some 63.5 million clandestine users from accessing the site through proxies, governments or institutions in freer societies will have an even harder time trying to block surging demand for Facebook.
The irony of Facebook’s one-billion-member landmark is that the company is still struggling to convince investors to buy its shares. After a much-hyped Initial Public Offering (IPO) earlier this year, Facebook’s shares have depreciated sharply owing to scepticism that its advertising revenue model is exaggerated. A desperate Facebook management is selling the idea of targeted advertising and how corporations can get value by tapping into personal consumption preferences and choices of the sea of humanity called FBers. The threat of such “behavioural marketing” impinging on privacy of Facebook users remains, but potential advertising revenues are critical to the future growth of Facebook as a profit-chasing entity.
With approximately 35 per cent of the world’s population (i.e. 2.45 billion people) having some form of Internet access today, Facebook is inching closer to claiming half of the world’s netizens as FBers. The resultant transfer of content from the “open Internet” to a members-only space has its downsides, but the financial bottomline for Facebook Inc. demands even greater numbers of users within its fold so that advertisers have nowhere to display except on Facebook. Thus far, information security has been fairly well honoured by Facebook’s bevy of data managers and technicians. But will a financially desperate Facebook start leaking users’ names, addresses and inclinations to hungry marketers or, even more sinisterly, to intelligence agencies or authoritarian states hunting for dissidents?
The downside of a mass-subscribed technology behemoth like Facebook is that it already knows too much about one-seventh of the earth’s human inhabitants. Can we trust the vehicle that has mushroomed while rebuilding virtual inter-personal and inter-group trust to make the world a smaller place? More than domestic legislation, it is through the emerging domain in international problem-solving called Internet governance that gargantuan mediums like Facebook can be checked from causing harm. A better regulated but still free Facebook would not look scary when it touches the two billion mark.

The writer is a professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs