The Facebook Community Effect
Every morning, all over the world, Generations Y and Z start to connect the world on Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Belonging to a Facebook group is like a lifetime membership of a particularly loquacious and persistent cult.
Unlike other social media sites though, Facebook builds a sense of community of an intimate kind, even if the group is a large one. Every Facebook group becomes a kind of family, and like all families feels warm and dysfunctional at the same time. People ask for tips, apartment, jobs, everything that could potentially make their lives better.
It is astonishing how much people who never had contact suddenly find so much to say to each other on a hourly basis once connected. When you are a member of a Facebook group you have the right and the duty to either give or receive and that's what make those communities so powerful. It enables certain kind of ideas and actions, and discourages others. It connects, encloses, re-connects, reinforces, sucks in participants towards a conceptual centre, among other things.
Facebook is our bubble, a digital representation of our comfort zone. The logic of the group lies in finding sameness and locating convergences. Those dissenting are pushed outwards as they find their comments ignored or petulantly reacted to. After a while, it is simply not worth the effort to disagree. Ideas not fitting in into the dominant ethos of a group cannot survive.
If media is air, Facebook would be what lies underground. It validates all existing ideas, strengthens stereotypes, doubles down on a point of connection, operates through the axis of similarity and familiarity. An instant messaging platform like Facebook Messenger renews fading connections and rescues once meaningful relationships from withering away. But the very fact that here we deepen the circle of familiarity and form a group that rallies around some dominant values and ideas makes this platform perhaps the most powerful tool of propaganda that exists today. Its comfortable nature invites wide participation, even from those that are otherwise wary of technology. And best of all, it is invisible to the outside world until it emerges as rock hard certainty.
What you have to understand is that on Facebook you will see what you want and what you like. The world is crafted from ideas which in turn is cast by the way human minds are thrown together. New forms of social media are configured in ways that are producing newer patterns of convergence and divergence in the ways we think and the ideas we agree upon. Among all the media platforms, Facebook helps reconnect us to the dominant ideas of a homogenous social group. Politically and culturally, this has profound implications, the contours of which we have not yet fully grasped.
If you want to go deeper, I highly recommend to try Data-selfie (that is a creepy tool by the way) in order to understand how much Facebook knows about you but also to get some interesting insights about Machine Learning and personality predictions.