Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

abstraction of a person that is useful for organizing and understanding one’s fiscal affairs. It used to be the ongoing joke that governmental agencies cared little about the individual person, preferring instead to consider them in terms of their social security numbers and gross income. This was funny because it had once been strange to think of oneself as nothing but a number in a machine, but since it has now become customary to identify with one’s earnings, this joke is seldom told.

      So anyway, you’re designing your Facebook profile for the first time, and you come to the following question: “Occupation/School.” For the sake of simplicity, imagine that you are me when I first started writing this: a graduate student at the University of West Georgia (UWG). I type that in. Incidentally, I discover that the dual title is appropriate since the school that I attend also signs my checks as my employer. But there is no space to provide that interesting detail. I am, however, given a space to fill in my emphasis of study. Since I am thankfully not limited to the anonymous list of college majors, I write: “Existential and Phenomenological Psychology.” I have presented myself as a student/employee of UWG who studies “Existential and Phenomenological Psychology.” I have taken the depth and breadth of my experiences that comprise my biography, identity, role, and self as a graduate psychology student at UWG and fitted it into two bits of information. These two bits of information are not my identity; they are an abstraction of my identity. This is helpful for me because I do not have the time to list the sum total of my experiences of being said student and helpful for the Facebook community for similar reasons (who might not care about how I stumbled into existential phenomenology by way of cognitive neuroscience and Buddhism). Indeed, we see how this abstraction is helpful in understanding my “Occupation/School” for a number of reasons.

      Now we have an example of the usefulness of abstractions in the presentation of ourselves on Facebook. This procedure of abstraction into, for example, an occupational identity, is a necessary limitation on the social presentation of one’s self that gets fitted into Facebook. In this example, one is allowed two bits to convey as much information as possible. This is beneficial because one gets to share valuable social information in an eminently simple manner. Moreover, the value of this specific example might be seen in the precedent for the question of occupation during social introductions at parties, dates, etc. While this might be safe and socially valuable, the occupational abstraction is not the person. Indeed, it says little about one’s family, relationships, convictions, experiences, etc. After all, you are not your occupational abstraction. When one begins to allow one’s occupational abstraction to inform one’s existence, then one becomes one’s occupational abstraction. This reversal of the abstraction process has been here termed “abstractification.” Here one finds an example in the executive that would sooner take her own life than face the shame of losing her job, which is unfortunately imaginable.

      Okay, so it is possible to abstractify one’s occupation. Where does Facebook fit in? To be sure, occupational abstractification pre-dates Facebook by at least twenty centuries, but look at how it has been facilitated by Facebook. In addition to “Occupation/School,” one finds a series of discrete and limited categories that together make up the Facebook profile, and through which a person may interact with other persons. Each of these instances—the discrete and limited categorization of personality and the latter’s use for subsequent sociality—are modes by which Facebook has been responsible of the abstractification of its users.

      By limiting the categories and options by which one may describe oneself, a necessary and even directed de-individuation occurs. Lanier (2009) explains that the Facebook design could have easily been done differently:

      If someone wants to use words like “single” or “looking” in a self-description, no one is going to prevent that. Search engines will easily find instances of those words. There’s no need for an imposed, official category.

      If you read something written by someone who used the term “single” in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple-choice database. Yes, it would be a tiny bit more work for everyone, but the benefits of semiautomated self-presentation are illusory. If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it. (p. 38)

      While the difference between “single” and “looking” provides some information regarding one’s world of romance by way of an abstraction, Lanier explains that something more is lost by the pre-determination of these categories. This assumes that my “single” is your “single” is the nineteenth century “single.” In the nineteenth century, the status of “single” in your twenties meant that people whispered about you behind your back; to define oneself by such a detail would have been most impertinent! Today, when a woman who has been dateless in two years uses the term “single,” she might betray a certain bit of loneliness in her very manner of speaking it. A man whose five-year marriage recently fell apart might use “single” and betray a whole other set of emotions—for example, relief, elation, or despair. This might be further contrasted with a high school student whose use of the designation “single” is just one of a flurry of relationship statuses that betrays little more than the flippant manner with which romance has been held. The vast variability of meaning that “single” has when spoken by different people in different places and times has been standardized by Facebook into the generic status of “single.”

      In the above example, the relationship status becomes a convenient marker for an infinite number of possible variations. This becomes a problem when “single” begins to depict something absolute and definite instead of something ambiguous and vague. Consider the analogy to painting. In Realist artwork, there is an attempt to represent on a canvas the spectral image of, for instance, a landscape. These pieces may be evaluated in terms of their similarity to the original. Cézanne, an Impressionist, has remarked that these masters have “replaced reality by imagination and by the abstraction which accompanies it” (in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 12). The Impressionists paint a landscape “no longer covered by reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and to other objects” (p. 12). Indeed, in painting one does not represent a landscape that one has seen, but shares a unique experience. Returning to the topic of Facebook profiles—these do not capture the individual in her singularity as if she were a finite object. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s description of the Impressionist artist’s task, modified for the present discussion: If the Facebook user is to express herself,

      … the arrangement of [her words] must carry with it this indivisible whole, or else [her profile] will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each [detail] must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. (p. 15)

      To complete the analogy, sharing oneself through the categorical limitations of Facebook would be akin to asking Cézanne to paint a portrait using only two pigments and without blending them. To be sure, he would probably produce something most impressive, but the point is that he has been supremely limited in his expression.

      The second instance of de-individuation of which I have accused Facebook concerns its role in mediating relationships. Namely, one does not interact with one’s “Facebook friends” as a unique individual, but must interact by way of the abstractions of personality like a puppeteer with marionettes. As has already been shown, this dramatically reduces and nearly wipes out any personal individuality by restricting self-presentation to generalized personality traits. Suddenly the template by which your personality gets abstracted into bits of information becomes exceedingly consequential. Consider the question of gender. The question does not read: “With which abstraction do you most identify—‘Male’ or ‘Female’?” though this may be implied. Instead you get to decide which of the two you are. Consider the problematic limitations these two categories present, which effectively exclude transgender, pre- and post-operation transexual, and queer genders, among others, from representation. Nobody gets to interact in the social space mediated by Facebook as a transgender. Consider also the nebulousness of the genders provided. Are you male or female? One finds no additional space for qualifications, or variable options, depending on context. One only finds “Male or Female.” It doesn’t