Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves

Roberto Simanowski

Published by Columbia University Press 2018

Facebook Society

Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves

Roberto Simanowski
Translated by: Susan H. Gillespie

https://doi.org/10.7312/sima18272

Overview
Contents

About this book

Roberto Simanowski takes Facebook as a starting point to investigate our social-media society—and its insidious consequences for our concept of the self. Presenting a creative, philosophically informed perspective that speaks to a shared reality, Facebook Society asks us to come to terms with the networked world.

Author / Editor information

Roberto Simanowski is a German scholar of digital media and culture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. His books include Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (Columbia, 2016) and Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics, and Literacy (2016).

Susan H. Gillespie is a noted translator from German and vice president for special global initiatives at Bard College. Her translations include numerous essays by Theodor W. Adorno, selected poems of Paul Celan, and other works of fiction, philosophy, and musicology.

Reviews

Jussi Parikka, author of Digital Contagions and A Geology of Media:
From Pascal to Butler, Goethe to Baudrillard, Facebook Society offers a rich philosophical engagement with one of the most important platforms of our time. Simanowski's skillful text demonstrates how the mundane nature of Facebook includes a long media ecology of issues which bind us to others as communities and through friendship while defining what we are as subjects. This book offers coordinates to nothing less than the transformation of this political field.

Lutz Koepnick, author of On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary:
Who says Facebook can only lead to a flattening of intellectual life and political discourse? In a series of intriguing readings, Simanowski offers a compelling assessment of Zuckerberg’s empire without capitulating before its celebration of ceaseless connectivity and frenzied interaction. Whether it draws on Schopenhauer, Kracauer, or Nancy, Facebook Society brilliantly exemplifies why thought and theory remain essential to gauge the impact of social media on our imagination, our sense of self and community, and our ability to engage the past as a medium to shape different futures.

Andreas Huyssen, author of Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia:
Facebook Society is a wonderfully rich and deeply thought extended essay on a symptomatic social medium of our day. With his focus on autobiography, friendship, memory, and narrative Simanowski outlines ways in which digital media have the power to change human perception and social relations. A broad historical, literary, and critical perspective on social media such as Simanowski’s is very much needed both in the humanities and in the social sciences.

Jane M. Gaines, author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?:
Facebook Society arrives at the moment when the idea that 'Facebook is us' is front page news. Just in time, Roberto Simanowski gives us a theory as to how it is that Facebook produces the very subjects who cannot feel shortchanged by what it offers. But he delivers more. Here is the crucial test of the philosophy of history and Frankfurt School critical theory brought to bear on the phenomenon defining the sociality of our time.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
1. Stranger Friends Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Automatic Autobiography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
3. Digital Nation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Epilogue to the English Edition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;

eBook

Published: September 24, 2018
ISBN: 9780231544344