Facebook and Critique of Everyday Life

I'll start things off with a question I asked for a paper I wrote last year, a paper applying the thought of Marxist philosopher of capitalsm and everyday life, Henri Lefebvre (for a super-interesting class in the department of east asian studies at the U of T taught by Ken Kawashima). My starting point was a passage in his Critique of Everyday Life Vol. 2, in which Lefebvre predicts a further degeneration of an already alienating mass media. According to Lefebvre:

"The mass media shape taste and cloud judgement. They instruct and they condition. With their saturation of images,current affairs and 'news' devoid of anything new, they fascinate and they nauseate. They expand communications and they threaten coherence and thought, vocabulary and verbal expression, language itself. Will they reach the extreme point where the 'world of expression' is exhausted, where everyone will be a spactacle for everyone else, where the event will be broadcast while it is happening? We call this extreme point the Great Pleonasm, the Supreme Tautology, the Final Identification of the real with the known, surprise annihilated by the illusion of permanent surprise - ambiguity annihilated by its own triumph." (Lefebvre, 2002).

Facebook (among any number of internet functions) would appear to represent the fruition of a number of these predictions. Of course, the best news has long been news captured ‘as it happens’, but check out this cbc report (see URL below) which posits how today’s digital technology-enabled populace has enabled a scenario where the news - in this case of the Virginia Tech Massacre - is brought as “a gritty and immediate reality for millions”.

At the same time, I think we can certainly see the sometimes ‘pleonastic’ (pleonasm = an excess of words) nature of Facebook (or MySpace, or blogs). For a vivid example, here’s an exerpt from a New Yorker article about Facebook (which is, incidentally, a great backgrounder for those not too familiar with Facebook - again, see URL below):

"Harvard Facebook members belong to more than ten thousand, many of which exist only online. The appeal of such groups – including Harvard People for the Eating of Tasty Animals (forty members), I Went to a Public School…Bitch (twenty-five hundred members), Jews Who Love Booze (fifteen members), and The We Need to Have Sex in Widener Before We Graduate Interest Group (a hundred and forty members)—is that they allow students to promote different aspects of their identities while showing off their collegiate wit. 'It may well look like dog food,' says the home page of the group Cracklin’ Oat Bran Is the Shit (eight-four members). 'But we all know that cracklin’ oat bran is an amazing cereal. We don’t just eat it for breakfast either. We eat it for every meal of the day. Cracklin’ oat brain isn’t just a cereal; it’s a way of life.'"

Yet for Lefebvre, this sort of alienation is actually a realienation; or it should be. The process of alienation in everyday life is one of alienation-disalienation-realienation, where disalienation constitutes a critique of the ambiguities present in everyday life. This is true of all modes of consumption, where Lefebvre’s central example (or one of them) is the leisure industry. The question with regards to Facebook, then, is, as an extremely popular new kind of consumption, what is its critique? What sorts of alienations and ambiguities within the context of everyday life does it address?

New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/15/060515fa_fact_cassidy
CBC report: www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/04/17/websites-virginia.html
Work Cited: Lefebvre, H. 2002. Critique of Everyday Life Vol. 2, Verso