The Philosophers' Cocoon

After over 10 years of being on FaceBook, I quit the platform over increasing worries and concerns I had about transparency, privacy, and other issues. This was the culmination of a gradual withdrawal. First, a few years ago, I deleted the app from my phone. Soon thereafter, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, I deleted all its permissions to log in to other websites I use (Typepad did not make the switch easy). Then, I asked on Twitter what revelation, if anything would cause people to quit, and many people responded that nothing would make them quit. I thought the same, that I was stuck for good, and that thought worried me. A couple of days ago, in what I feel to be a moment of clarity, I deactivated and cut ties brusquely. 

It's early days now but I feel happy and liberated with the decision. I notice how my behavior had become too dependent on it, I still check it often without thinking, as I take a break from writing, even though checking it will now bring me to the login screen. These habits will take a long time to unlearn. I worry that other media I am still part of (such as Twitter) might soon take over and play the same role. I'll decide what to do when I get to that point. 

I thought it would be difficult to quit, as I have moved country several times and use the platform to keep in touch with friends (my extended family, fortunately, are social media shy and so I keep in touch with them through other means). But especially, I used the platform for professional engagement.

This started a few years ago, maybe around 2015 or so, when the philosophy blogs I contributed to started to dwindle (except when it concerned "issues in the profession"). Concurrently, informal philosophical engagement on Facebook increased. Soon, there seemed little point to blogging and I put blogging on the back burner. This brings me to the central point of this blogpost, to which I have no answer: the philosophy social media dilemma. What happens and what should a philosopher do if the academic community massively has moved on to making its informal engagements happen on one platform, specifically, Facebook? 

There are many philosophers on Facebook. This has a self-enforcing and amplifying effect. Often the value of being part of a platform is the mainly a function of the number of people in your network. Michael Chwe understood the power of such communal meeting places which he explores in the book Rational ritual (2001). Briefly, the book argues that rituals are rational because they solve coordination problems. Rituals take place in public places where we all see each other and can see what the other is doing. This creates knowledge and meta-knowledge, knowledge of what others will do. Meta-knowledge is important to solve coordination problems, particularly non-zero sum games where we can coordinate action and receive goods. A classic example is the stag hunt (invented by Rousseau), where you get a large payoff if you all cooperate, but no payoff (no stag) if you don't. If others don't coordinate with you, it is better to go hunt hares on your own. So you ideally need to know if others will want to play stag. According to Chwe, ritual spaces afford us with this crucial knowledge by bringing us together.

The value of ritual meeting spaces thus depends crucially on how many people (especially people you want to reach) there are. He regards the Super Bowl as a prime example: it is a big ritual for Americans. When Apple launched its Mackintosh computer there in 1984, it crucially relied on this meta-knowledge. Macs were not compatible with existing personal computers. But people present at the super Bowl knew that other people had also seen the ad, thus they were more likely to buy it as other people might also buy the product.  Similarly, engaging as a philosopher on Facebook is useful given there are already many other philosophers. 

The Apple super bowl ad. 

So being part of Facebook philosophers find community, fellowship with others, they signal cooperative intent. So far so good.  But is it also a good public forum for rational, ritualized engagements between philosophers? I am not so sure that it is. I think it is problematic that the platform has become so dominant for philosophers to engage with each others. It's good to have low-carb alternatives or complements to in-person meetings, but there are downsides to doing this on FaceBook: 

1. The platform's algorithm for post visibility is not transparent. We do not know which posts are seen and which ones aren't. I'm leaving now aside worries I have about election meddling and data selling, which were foremost in my mind when leaving the platform (see this post of mine, and also this post by Matthew Liao). It is kind of stunning that you put things out there, and you don't know who sees it. The platform controls who will see it. Why would we accept such an opaque way of doing things? Worse, we get "trained" to put content that people will react to. This is what Facebook calls posts that will elicit "meaningful interaction". This means, innocuously, not linking to Youtube videos or news sites, but less innocuously, putting posts out there we expect will make an impact. We hopefully would move away from a situation where you say things just to make an impact in the attention economy, but this is what is happening. As the number of philosophers on FaceBook grows, your posts will have to compete with many other posts. 
2. The ambiguity of saying things private/public. I tried to only write things I would be comfortable sharing in a public venue because I knew friends whose posts were screenshot and gleefully shared. Still, the faux intimacy of the platform creates an ambiguity of the private/public. You will sometimes put something there in a position of vulnerability, and that can be misinterpreted, abused, etc. People who are already in disadvantaged positions are more likely to suffer the negative effects of this. I know this is also a problem for Twitter, but Twitter feels more public. 
3. The ambiguity of signaling group membership and philosophical engagement. Given that Facebook serves as a ritual space, you would want to signal certain relevant parts of your identity, for example, what your position is in debates on transgender identity and rights. Such positions tell something about who you are as a person. I do not think there is anything wrong with this per se. I concur with Neil Levy that there is nothing morally suspect about signaling group membership in this way. We cheaply signal all the time that we are part of certain groups and subgroups. For example, religious believers sitting in a church are (relatively cheaply) signaling to other churchgoers they hold similar beliefs and probably values too. Sure, you could be a hypocrite, but what would be the point? Cheap signaling works well if you are already well aligned and not much can be gained by false signals. If you signal your position on certain moral issues, you are signaling where you stand without (I believe) thereby necessarily making claims about moral superiority. But the problem is that we engage as about these moral issues in a philosophical way to. Soon, the waters get muddied and the line between philosophy seminar room talk and real world talk that impacts people becomes hard to draw.
4. Facebook entrenches power relations and privilege relationships, with people who are more central nodes in the network (either because they are great at networking, or have prominent positions, or both) benefiting more from engagements than others. 
5. Facebook can lead to will-depletion. As James Williams argues social media is like a faulty GPS. It leads you away from your goals, toward its own goals. Our goals are connecting with other philosophers and learning from them. The goals of Facebook only align with those insofar as they can create a dependency of us on their platform. This requires habituating us in engaging with the platform frequently. When is it enough? Well, it's up to you. Problem is: it's hard to put boundaries on social media use, especially as it is socially acceptable to scroll down on one's phone. Williams argues "the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else. This increase in self-regulatory burden may pose a unique challenge for those living in poverty, who, research suggests are more likely to begin from a place of willpower depletion relative to everyone else. This is largely due to the many decisions and trade-offs they must make on a day-to-day basis that those who don’t live in poverty don’t have to make." In other words, people who get most out of Facebook thanks to the power of their position in the network will also likely have fewer costs of the habituation patterns the platform instills in us, less will depletion. 

One might say that this is inevitable, that this is a digitally fallen world where dependency on large, untransparent and self-interested corporations has become inevitable anyway. Why fight Facebook, Amazon, why bother? Or one might say that on balance it is still good to stay because Facebook helps us realize many goods. On the whole, I do feel the loss, and everyone's calculation is different. Still, even if one might argue that the gains still outweigh the costs, it is still a pity that philosophy, for the time being, is stuck with such a suboptimal platform. I also believe that moving to another platform, perhaps more ethical, will not solve all these problems.