Mark Zuckerberg published a rather lengthy letter on February 16th, 2017, where he made several grand claims of what next steps his social media empire is interested in taking. Titled, ‘Building Global Community,’ this is very much Zuckerberg’s nationalistic call-to-arms for what he sees as one of history’s great leaps forward, seeking to transform his own creation into a platform for digital globalization. Community permeates throughout the entire piece and it is this idea of community that Zuckerberg is experimenting with and that is why I’ve chosen to use the Culture Corner this week to examine this idea of the Technocultural.
The Technocultural is the “product of the dynamic interaction of biological and technological entities and processes,” long held to be simply the osmosis of the artificial and the organic (1). But this definition can be traced back to as early as the 1930s (and the idea itself going even further back, an example being E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops PUB 1909). What Zuckerberg is proposing is a heightened form of the Technocultural, where it is no longer based on the interaction and collision of the biological and the technological, but on the technological now perceived as an integral part to the continued existence of the biological.
Zuckerberg himself refers to social media as a “short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified many times. This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it “oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes,” and I suppose his self-acknowledgement of both the beneficial and harmful nature of the very tool he aided in the creation of is important considering he is calling for a re-evaluation of how we perceive social media (2).
This reminds me a lot of what writer and literary critic Umberto Eco said a few years ago, that
Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.
Where Umberto Eco saw a rising threat of idiots and their means to mobilize, Zuckerberg instead seems more intent on tapping into the inherent power of these collected masses to forge a completely globalized community comprised of many smaller communities of people. In the beginning of this piece, Zuckerberg poses what he sees as the most important question, “are we building the world we want?” His antidote to this toxic, polluted, and over-conflated world is of course, Facebook. The social media mastermind goes on to say,
In our society, we have personal relationships with friends and family, and then we have institutional relationships with the governments that set the rules. A healthy society also has many layers of communities between us and government that take care of our needs. When we refer to our “social fabric”, we usually mean the many mediating groups that bring us together and reinforce our values
Take into consideration this re-imagination of the Technocultural within the realm of Zuckerberg’s many aspirational claims. Techno– itself is derived from the ancient Greek word τέκτων meaning “carpenter” (3). This is why I see Zuckerberg’s efforts as a part of this re-imagining, as Technology itself is the answer to the question of ‘are we building the world we want?’ – the spiritual visage of the ancient Greek carpenter, shaping the foundations of society with great skill and precision. I hesitate but cannot help but conjure an image of Christ himself, the son of a carpenter. And when Zuckerberg invokes this mesh of ‘social fabric,’ the cohesion of our personal relationships and institutional relationships, Technology once again reigns as the answer to this incompatibility as Techno- invokes this idea of the interweaving of fabrics as it is also derived from the classical Latin word texere or “to weave” (3).
Though I have my hesitance towards a lot of what Mark Zuckerberg sees as the coming of another great leap, I can’t deny my approval in the investment of our efforts towards establishing a kind of global community over a digital space. The letter says, “Social media already provides more diverse viewpoints than traditional media ever has. Even if most of our friends are like us, we all know people with different interests, beliefs and backgrounds who expose us to different perspectives… But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives” (2).
And Zuckerberg intends to do so through the implementation of AI to engage in the rapid and errorless attempts to “tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization” (2). It will be through the mass archivist efforts of this artificial intelligence and the disintegration of cultural nuance as we transcend into a globalized community onto a digital platform that speaks to why this Technocultural ideal will reign. We will become indebted to these artificial systems to remember and replicate our own culture, as one day it will be the means in which we filter our lives.
– Christopher LaSasso
The Junction Journal 