Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

women one seems more feminine; one must choose what one is independent of context. Once chosen, every subsequent interaction can only be done with the standardized gender with which one has identified. Not only does this promote a dramatic over-simplification of gender, it also restricts one’s experience of gender to the designated dichotomy. By extending this example to all of the other personality identifiers on the Facebook profile, one begins to see just how restricted one is when interacting with their friends through the mediation of Facebook.

      Imagine that, instead of designing Facebook profiles, we had designed marionettes. Like the Facebook profile, these puppets could be personalized in certain predetermined and generic ways. Identification with one’s puppet would initially be laughable. Yet we proceed to lower our puppets down onto the stage to interact with other puppets. One can only interact with other puppeteers—concrete persons—through one’s own puppet and through theirs. This is further limited by a restriction of only the eight to ten movements the puppet can perform. The dance is initially awkward and frustrating, and one might wish to peel back the black curtain and have a direct conversation with another puppeteer who, incidentally, may or may not resemble their puppet. Anyway, this continues until great mastery is had over the life of one’s puppet. One might even become impressively talented at making friends and gaining popularity—might become the life of the stage—despite having been limited to eight to ten movements. Popular or not, this increased sophistication of puppet-use is how the stage-world slowly beings creeping into the life-world. This begins when the puppeteer, having grown accustomed to, and increasingly adept at performing these eight to ten movements, starts to privilege these puppet movements in her actual life. Her concrete interactions with concrete people begin to resemble the puppet-interactions on stage.

      To be sure, the beginning may seem harmless but the consequences are grave. Lanier explains that since social networks began mediating relationships, “A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become” (p. 6). One’s abstracted personality profile on Facebook begins to inform one’s actual personality through repetitive use. That is, one becomes so accustomed to one’s abstract personality as depicted by Facebook that it becomes increasingly indistinguishable from one’s concrete personality. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Lanier compares this abstraction of the person suffered at the hand of Facebook to the abstraction of music suffered at the hand of MIDI (which is the program responsible for the digitization of music). Lanier explains:

      Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. It was a way for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool distinguishable from the music itself. Different people could make transcriptions of the same musical recording, for instance, and come up with slightly different scores. (p. 10)

      As an abstraction of music, MIDI has been an indispensable tool for the organization, codification, and dispensation of music. But it can never reproduce the musical note as the “bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition.” Given his impressive and eclectic musical talent, Lanier should not be here accused of hyperbole. The digital note represented on MIDI is no more the original sound than a musical score is the actual song. In each, the former is an abstraction and the latter is a concretion. However, with enough exposure to the abstraction, one begins to increasingly forget about the concrete experience of which the abstraction was originally a mere representation. Lanier continues,

      After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in [which can here be substituted with abstractification] is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures [abstractions] are solidified into effectively permanent reality. (p. 10)

      After time, one might no longer remember that there was anything more to say about one’s occupation than that it was at the University. This same person’s eyes glaze over in life when, having politely inquired about somebody else’s occupation, they are met with a description of experience rather than a two-bit response. Lanier wonders “whether people are becoming like MIDI notes—overly defined, and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer. This has enormous implications: we can conceivably abandon musical notes, but we can’t abandon ourselves” (p. 10).

      Two types of technology, utilized specifically by Facebook but seen in other forms of social media, will here be described with emphasis on their role in abstractifying its users. The first details the “status update” which provides users with the opportunity to share with the greater Facebook-mediated social community what one is up to or how one is feeling. The second details the integrated use of digital cameras, with which users may share photographical representations of events or experiences with the Facebook-mediated social community. Moreover, it will be shown how, with each of these tools, the Facebook-mediated social community may interact with the concrete reality of the user.

      The abstracted world of Facebook begins to inform the concrete world of experience through the technology employed. Consider the status update. With the status update, I am ostensibly able to keep continuous contact with my friends and loved ones. But since my contact is limited to the restrictions imposed by the template of Facebook, I am actually in constant contact with Facebook reality which, like MIDI tone, pales in comparison to the real thing. As has been explained above, you and I are both persons, each with a wealth of exceedingly unique and meaningful concrete experiences. For me right now that includes tired eyes, a restless mind, patient temperament, and a tremendous amount of typing, which is unfolding at an unusually late hour. Nothing I could state in a status update would sufficiently inform my abstract friends what the last several hours have been like for me. But I yield to the restricted social world of Facebook in service to what I have come to believe is just as good as the real thing. I might even include a picture—adding about a thousand words. This helps. My friends might see me in my underwear with swollen eyes, hunched over a laptop, and conclude something about my evening, but they are still limited to an abstraction of my night. The concrete experience of my evening has been collected by the eye of a camera and transmitted into the abstract world of Facebook. My concrete experience is represented by a picture, an abstraction. The reversal—abstractification—occurs when the abstract world of Facebook comes back through the camera and informs my concrete experience, like the puppeteer who has limited her life-actions to those of her puppet. Let me explain.

      My unusually late-hour post invariably draws some attention, and one of my “friends” decides that she “likes” it. The supreme and absolute restrictions placed on evaluational options make exceedingly ambiguous the “like” that I have been awarded. Despite this, I have a concrete experience of being “liked.” There is actually a concrete experience that follows from the abstract indication that some person, infinitely restricted by Facebook’s program design, has liked my picture. The puppeteer experiences the affirmation that has been limitedly bestowed on her puppet. I have had a concrete experience through my abstracted personality because the latter has been “liked” by another abstracted personality. While the reversal has begun, it is not yet complete; abstractification has not yet taken place. Abstractification occurs when the concrete experience of being “liked” becomes indistinguishable from, or identical to, the concrete experience as a person of being liked by another person. Try also the scarier version: when the experience of being “liked” is actually preferable to the concrete experience. In its abstractified form, the abstract world of Facebook has intercepted concrete social contact.

      Karl Marx (Marx & Engels, 1987) explains this concrete social world marked by the relationships that we keep:

      Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically-cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of you real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person