In my junior year of high school, I wrote an essay for my American Studies class about why I felt that Facebook was a distinctly American institution. I used a quote from Lewis Lapham’s Essay, “Who and What is American? The Things We Continue to Hold in Common,” as a starting point. I chose an excerpt from quote from Lapham that casually defined the American condition: “Grant the existential terms and conditions of the American enterprise (i.e., that we are all bound to invent ourselves).”
Using Lapham’s idea as a basis, I reflected that Facebook was much like America in that individuals are all bound to “invent themselves.” In my class, we discussed how being an American citizen is unique in the world for the degree that people must form their own identities. Here, according to our code of ideals, family history and class station do not define an individual. That gift (or burden) is left up to the individuals themselves. Much the same way, Facebook gives each user an identical blue and white square to fill. Then it is up to each user to use that square to fashion an identity using whatever groups, photos, or posts they so choose. As we have discussed in our seminar, many people utilize this power to create idealized virtual portraits of themselves.
My essay went on to assert that in a historical sense, too, the evolution of Facebook has some parallels to the evolution of American society. Participation in Facebook was originally available only to students of Harvard University. In time, it grew to encompass other Ivy League schools and eventually all college students. Today, anyone with an email address who is willing to say they are 13 years old is entitled to an account. In a similar pattern, American society began encompassing segments of society over time. At its inception, only white, property holding males were privy to full participation. In waves, poor citizens, women, and African Americans become full-fledged members of American society. Following that point, I concluded the paper with perhaps the silliest theory of all, an assertion that the popularity of Farmville is closely correlated to the American cult of the agrarian farmer.
Now, clearly, my American studies observations about Facebook’s nature are little more than philosophical musings. But they do raise a relevant issue that is worth considering in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, about how Facebook should behave as an American company (and cultural export) that has hundreds of millions of international users. It is evident from the YouTube controversy in Brazil that American social networking enterprises run into problems associated with a clash of values as they expand overseas. These companies, that tend to value free speech and freedom of expression, come into conflict with regimes for which that is not a priority. Should Google and Facebook fight to preserve free speech overseas? Or should they embrace a more cultural relativist (and less internationally risky) policy of complying with local standards of censorship?