ABSTRACT
For a time, I thought Facebook was trolling me. It began to recommend to me lots of people you may know who were dead philosophers or media theorists – Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Neil Postman, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall McLuhan and others. I asked my Facebook friends, many of whom are in the same line of work, whether they were seeing them too. But no, was the consensus. Just me. So I turned it into a small game. Each time another dead thinker appeared as a recommended Facebook friend, I would take a screenshot of this and share it on my Timeline with a caption referencing their work and making a joke about how it might connect to Facebook. So Walter Benjamin – the work of friendship in the age of mechanical reproduction. Marshall McLuhan – the Zuckerberg Galaxy. And so on. The first to appear was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so I shared a screenshot
of this +1 Add Friend image with a caption modifying Rousseau’s famous line from The Social Contract of 1762 (‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, Rousseau 1987: 141) to read instead ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is on Facebook’. The response, like the joke itself, was unremarkable. About fifteen of my friends clicked the like button, mostly other academics, mixed in with a couple of former students, while two other people also shared it with their own networks. One of my friends, a professor from Canada with whom I’ve interacted very often on Facebook for more than six years but have never met, added a comment and we began a conversation, on-screen below the Rousseau image:
ANDREW: Graham, did you coin the phrase, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is on Facebook’?
