Emerging configurations of form and content in Facebook prod-user culture

Introduction

            At this stage of our cultural history, we are communicating with each other with machines that science has managed to render coherent and expressive to the point of obliterating their ontological rigidity and inhuman literalness. Facebook is one among several of these complex artefacts that were built out of electrical impulses to use McLuhanesque signifiers.

            This new medium, together with other interactive social media platforms, is our new means of representing the world, of patterning it beyond the older tools that one day did a similar job. New digital media are designers of reality, they express modern patterns of cognition, perception and thinking the world. This new medium of expression is the outcome of how we, one day, envisaged and organised the world we wanted to live in, and, in the meantime, it is shaping proliferating new realities born with the omniscient act of prod-usage.

            In a world where information and communication are dominating and forming our epistemic universes, narratives and human forms of expression have metamorphosed into new cultural forms and visual structures. This is nowhere more apparent than in our daily experience of social media which suffuses with memes, colourful postings, live conversations, private and public pictures of ourselves, shared links, etc.

            The following is a study of the new configurations of form and content in selected culinary Facebook posts, memes and photo-posing as examples of the new structures of meaning in our cyber-cultural era with an introductory part relating back to the origins of the cybernetic worldview. The study is carried out in the light of key notions from both Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser on the precedence of medium over message today translated in the work of prod-usage as the predominance of creative digi-visual form over a fluid content.

Cybernetics and the new world order

            It is not irrelevant as we look into social media form and content to draw a picture of the world that was born out of the ashes of the two World Wars giving us the science of cybernetics that did away with an immutable body, man as thought and form, and a stable humanity. The logics of technology became founded on the apparent necessity of certain actions, and technology was the realm where a desired but inexistent action could come to life. Technology spotted the existential emptiness that it could later come to fill in the form of pretexts of insufficiency concerning time, the body and an entire vision of the world. Change thus occurred, cybernetics shed light on imperfections then offered the tools to change them.

            Some such flaws were for example Freud’s psychoanalysis which delved into the human interior, the realm of the incomprehensible and the mysterious. Cybernetics reversed this interiority by viewing man as best determined by his social entourage and by exchange of self in openness. The unconscious is a dark thickness that needs to be interpreted via an external humanist judge. This therefore needed to change into some ultra-openness where the individual is at his/her best as a point in a rhizome of encounters and influences, as a nodal point in a networked structure where fusion and separation happen consecutively, metastasising human creativity, controlling contingency rather than being at the mercy of fixity.

            This led to one of cybernetics most fundamental characteristics and achievements: the simplification and reduction of the real, in other words, the formal redesigning of reality in data. When complexity could be simplified in cyberspace this aided its quick transmission and this is how cybernetics formalised the world and created the materiality from which its new forms were cast. The technological medium therefore took precedence over its message.

            Time was exorcised from its cumulative, burdensome chronology. Presentism and instantaneity became more suitable forms since the past mattered no more and the future made no sense. The body was thus relieved of the weight of its temporal dimensions and overcame its biological and cognitive finiteness in the realm of the virtual. Reality became contingent and could be controlled with the tools to manoeuvre this contingency.

            As for anxiety, machines promised protection from it. They produced a body in conformity with desire. Relations with other human beings as well as with nature passed through a network of technologies and services that have recycled time, space, social structures, representations and even knowledge. In other words, computerised systems effectuated a real renaissance of everyday life and culture today culminating in the form of social media that we have all come to use ubiquitously.

            Science and aesthetics moved away from the freedom of ideas to the freedom of form. Objects and machines no more adapted to humans, but gradually man was adapting to the rhythm of objects. Form moved out of the symbol of the written word. Technic form replaced the typographic word and came to shape human ideas and the mind. Information was cybernetics’ point of research, to be released without constraint in the incommensurable space of the Web no matter what the signifieds are to the signifier; an information that matters more than its content. This formal progress crushed the referent.

            Cybernetics can be said to have become the dominant cultural episteme as it came to be viewed as a solution to solitude and to the misery of the world. First launched as a scientific conception, cybernetics is today integrated in the deepest levels of our outlook on the world, and this has recently materialised in the contemporary forms of social media this study intends to research certain aspects of in terms of their reconfiguring of our epistemological structures..

Form and Content of Facebook

            Multimedia applications have merged several cultural forms such as photography, television and writing in a unified new digital form of streaming human expressiveness. McLuhan’s exhortation that “the medium is the message” has in recent times found itself explicative of this current state of affairs where “media determine our situation” (Kittler, xxxix). It had not persuaded many at the time it was uttered for its then much doubted explicit technical determinism, yet in recent years, it is making a conceptual comeback on the cultural scene for it aids in our attempts at understanding our digital existence in a world of advanced and ubiquitous tools of socio-virtual technologies.

            The endless flow of creative information on Facebook, its being a multi-form modern tool of transmission and communication, installed on mobile phones (as were the radio and television almost a century earlier), dependent upon prod-usage or content production by its users, renders it inevitably a multi-media medium that overpowers its own content. The capabilities of Facebook that have been augmented with users’ creativity all direct towards its capacities as a medium first and foremost. Content then follows, and its endless flowing and ephemerality inevitably relegate it to this McLuhanesque secondary position.

            The medium’s power to evoke so much, to design so much in innovative ways has truly been a revolution in emergent forms of cultural expression. Our original human pattern-making imagination today finds itself in full bloom with current digital media writing the world and re-designing it in new hitherto inexperienced ways. This study will look into Facebook culinary posts, memes and photo-posing as examples of innovative digital form and content. But before doing that it will investigate some of the notions related to McLuhan’s dictum and Flusser’s theory of what terms technic images. Both visionary theorists will fuel the research with its methodological infra-structure.

The Medium is the Message

            The idea this phrase brought into perspective since the sixties is that media per se overwhelm their content, that if a medium contains a message it is itself this message. This notion has gradually become paradigmatically meaningful with recent advancement in broadcasting and current internet technologies. The medium as episteme is today informing our attempts at understanding our media ecology since the affordances of the medium have become enhanced and omnipresent, and available to all alike with ultimate ease in usage (user-friendliness), and also in the medium’s unprecedented ubiquity.

            McLuhan’s defining of electronic technologies as “extensions of the senses” and of consciousness (1964) was in itself a notion that allowed for setting the medium above its content since it rendered it a tangible, material and cognitive prosthesis. When applied to mobile phones and tablets today, with what they can do, and can make us do, this notion comes to acquire deeper meaning, as this type of media are truly extending our cognitive abilities and our bodies’ capabilities, and completely altering the means and the forms by which we formerly designed and formulated our worlds.

            McLuhan introduced a new way of thinking about technology fitting the new times. Today digital machines, more than ever, are technologically extending our capacities and re-configuring the verb “to do” in radically new ways. This is the main reason why McLuhan was prophetic and aids in understanding the present since he “provid[ed] a method for studying the effects of the forms of communication on cognitive functions and culture, on social relations and knowledge systems” (Marchessault, 157).

            New media create new form. Without a medium to create its form, content does not exist. Facebook manipulates several high-definition media at once, in other words, several cultural forms: pixeled images (real and photoshopped), digital writing, television (live or video), emojis, emoticons, camera, emotions (the ‘like’ and ‘heart’ buttons); all flowing together onto digital screens in endless creative combinations, innovative cultural fusions and visual designs. This multiplication of media working harmoniously under the iconic logo Facebook accentuate the medium’s affordances more than its content, especially since the latter is in constant reproduction and endless variation and mobility.

            In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan wrote about the passage from the Gutenberg technology of print to electric technologies (he was the first to shed light on the electric bulb as a medium) and the new cultural era this turning-point in history heralded. Today, we are at a new phase of these techno-cultural metamorphoses where digital writing with all its connotations is fusing with a maximised visual culture on user-made social media. “Culture is […] recreated anew by every medium of communication _ from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility” (Postman, 9).

            McLuhan specified the era prior to the discovery of the medium of print as the period of orality of tribal man. He relocates orality in the electricity-laden times he sought to theorise with its defining traits of “decentralisation, implosion, outering [of the senses], instantaneous connection” (Marchessault, 171). Today, these notions have acquired new significations with the profusing content on Facebook and other social media. The medium’s affordances are creating new epistemological and cultural circuits that suffuse with creative prod-usage and what can be termed a digi-visual orality in a further elaboration of McLuhan’s vision of this electrical re-turn to tribal orality.

            Being an extension of ourselves, each new medium introduces new scales, new dimensions of perception into our affairs, new epistemological proportions into our lives. “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content and uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (McLuhan, 1964, 9).

            McLuhan stated that the content of any medium is another medium (1964, 8-18) and this is best epitomised in our contemporary social media artefacts. They are media structurally encrusted one in the other, forming what is termed multimedia technology. Facebook’s multi-layered architecture comprises of many media from the typographic letter to sound, photo, memes, icons, emojis, television,  gifs, etc… All functioning in digital co-existence creating a modern form of cognitive compositions on vertically flowing portable screens able to condense the whole of society in a book (de Certeau, 1984, xxii).

            Gutenberg technology with its conceptual linearity and the Cartesian culture that came with it were revolutionised by electric technologies, and the new world they inaugurated was characterised by simultaneity, intersected non-linear structures, excessive semantic visuality, etc. Today as Facebook prod-usage culture is occupying center stage, and before another new technology sets in, it is imperative to attempt an understanding of modern digital cultural forms and how they signify for today’s culture. Our modern, concretising, technological prosthetic existence and dependence on cyberspace, is giving birth to myriad new forms and genres of expression and consequently to new content.

            In his “The Galaxy Reconfigured”, McLuhan runs across different poetic epochs to explain how culture moved from the linear, Newtonian and closed system of perception, to “a mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total and diversified field” (1962, 267). What interests us in this notion is McLuhan’s concluding that electric technology brought about a new kind of literacy, media literacy, more suited to the new world and born out of its dialectics. Today’s social media forms are an expression of a culture utterly detached from former notions of temporal, spatial and epistemological closures (where cause led to effect), a culture synchronised alternatively and homogenised heterogeneously (where effect precedes cause).

            Facebook is one significant form of expression of this culture. Its digital pluralistic form combines visual technologies (face) with miscellaneous writing techniques (book), photography and portable television side by side with posting concise textuality, and all this within a networked system of smart internet technologies (algorithms, cookies, sliding touch screens, etc). It is epitomising our era of fusions and mergers, technological and cultural, where distinction of one from the other is becoming less and less tangible, and less and less relevant to the current cultural discourse. The social platform has moved from its original role of connecting people to a virtual cultural realm where user production is expressing new forms of post-modern envisioning of reality.

Vilém Flusser on the technic image

            Flusser’s work is of importance to this research for he has theorised the image culture brought forth by the media in the last decades of the previous century. He saw it as a turning point in critical thinking and in historical consciousness. The image today is central to all social media, be it still photography, or televisual postings. It has tremendously evolved on our portable screens and make up a congruous part of the digital forms studied in this research, namely culinary posts, memes and photo-posing. The portable internet plus camera technology has multiplied photos and images in our lives to the point of becoming a syntax of its own, recycling visual culture in this beginning of century, once more, as an ultra-evolved meaning-laden object of study.

            Flusser wrote in the cold war period on the technic image, isolating photography as a socio-cultural object of critical inquiry. His notions preluded the very times we live in today. Like McLuhan, he was not interested in the content of images but in photography as a cultural form; not in ‘what’ pictures meant but in ‘why’ they signified for our culture. “Flusser disagre[ed] with Benjamin’s claim that the image’s auratic character [Benjamin’s “aura” Flusser calls “magic”] has disappeared through the techniques of reproduction. To Flusser, it has taken on a different form” (Van der Meulen, 188).