Taina Bucher - Facebook

In the concluding chapter, I synthesize the book’s case studies by considering the different ways in which the assertion that Facebook is Facebook can be understood and why it matters. The argument is made that Facebook became new only recently, when existing words, categories and concepts ceased to be able to describe and explain it adequately. Furthermore, this chapter makes the case that Facebook has become a hyperobject of sorts, a thing too distributed in time and space, for us to get our heads around it. This unclarity, however, invites renewed attention and reflection, not just about what Facebook is but what we would like it to be.

1 1 Market capitalization measures the total value of a company based on the stock price multiplied by the shares outstanding.

2 2 Foote, Shaw and Mako (2018) found that scholarship using the term ‘social media’ increased fivefold between 2010 and 2015. Many of the articles examined were mainly about Facebook.

3 3 The same could possibly also be said about Google serving as a shorthand for search.

4 4 This definition is itself an accumulation by merging Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that a concept is composed of multiplicities and can be ‘considered as the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of its own components’ (1994: 20), and the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘family resemblance’ that holds that concepts are connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the conceptions.

5 5 We might think of the consistency of concepts in terms of a Venn diagram or, as Deleuze and Guattari say: ‘There is an area ab that belongs to both a and b, where a and b ‘become’ indiscernible. These zones, thresholds or becomings, define the internal consistency of the concept’ (1994: 20).

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.