It is a question that epitomizes the internet, a whirling landscape of all of humanity’s collective and personal information. Today, this landscape has become categorised and controlled; its mass of information is sorted at every instant and it has become a tool for the management of knowledge. The internet has become a central component of the public sphere, where ideas are debated and society’s norms are shaped. Facebook, being perhaps the most widely used social networking site currently available, has come to play a major role in this debate, as it is where individual humans come in direct contact with each other to share and discuss different information, an exercise that directly influences opinion.
Facebook, in a sense, represents the ideal of ‘the public’, as it is a collective of individuals, easily and quickly sharing information that is meaningful to them, without barriers. Here, one is exposed to an exponentially increasing variety of information, being offered quickly by the multitude of one’s contacts, all of whom come from different backgrounds and have different information to offer.
This is where the clamour of the internet becomes clearer, where information becomes knowledge. When we choose from the repository of information that is offered to us, we transform that information into knowledge. And when we share that knowledge with others, we are participating in what is the ultimate goal of the public sphere – to shape public opinion, the social imaginary.
The social imaginary, as articulated by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society. It is the background repository that shapes how citizens envision their shared spaces. The public debate that transpires on the internet, and specifically within the system of Facebook, constantly contributes to our opinions and ideas about the world and its workings.
The sharing of information runs the gamut from humourous cartoons to touching videos to serious articles. Many of us would have never heard of Susan Boyle were it not for Facebook. As well, the death of Michael Jackson was so influential that almost every Facebook status update was a eulogy for him, connecting and creating a shared sense of bereavement. And uncensored information about the bloody aftermath of the recent Iranian election was brought to the fore by the hundreds of people who posted and re-posted articles and videos – such as the disturbing image of the death of Neda – all of which has led some to describe this information-sharing as the first ‘internet revolution’, a testament to Facebook’s real power to inform and inspire.
To be sure, much of the information we receive on our home feeds is personal, or trivial, or even amusing. But this is reflective of the ebb and flow of our daily lives. We are concerned with the goings-on of our friends, we are gladdened by the silly bits of news and humour that they share, we are enriched by the more informative and unusual pieces of information they post, and we are humbled by their accomplishments (of which some of them post too many pictures and videos).
But there is other information that we receive, which, as mentioned earlier, is relevant to issues of social change. We receive information about atrocities in war-torn countries, we engage in debates about marijuana use among public figures, and we learn about how to get involved in animal shelters in our cities. This is civic culture at its most basic – citizens getting involved in issues that change and shape their societies.
It is in this way that the internet and Facebook, specifically, are vehicles for social change because they bring the issues directly to the people, and enable them to participate in the dialogue and, to paraphrase one man, to blog the change they want to see in the world. {w}
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