Facebook and Philosophy

What's on Your Mind?

Edited by D. E. Wittkower

Volume 50 in the Popular Culture and Philosophy® series

A fascinating, amusing, and almost disorientingly wide-ranging exploration of Facebook in particular and social media in general, with discussion moving smoothly from drunken photographs to Barack Obama to virtual sheep-tossing to ironic tweets to European toilet design—it’s just as varied and lively as your News Feed itself. Facebook and Philosophy is a thorough, entertaining, and multi-faceted exploration of what Facebook means for us and for our relationships. Writers from a variety of fields come together here to put the Facebook experience in perspective, in discussions ranging from the nature of friendship and its relationship to “friending,” to the (debatable) efficacy of “online activism.”

As the most extensive and systematic attempt to understand Facebook yet, and with plenty of new perspectives on Twitter and Web 2.0 along the way, while fun and thought-provoking, it is also of serious and significant value to anyone working with social media, whether in academia or in journalism, public relations, activism, or business.

In twenty-five chapters, authors answer questions such as:

Is the Status Update an effective way to form emotional bonds? Can our interactions on Facebook help us care about each other more? How does the Profile Picture act as a form of self-portraiture, and what do users attempt to communicate through it?
Can we truly be with others through our online profiles?
Should we think of the profile page as a representation of one’s self, or a kind of conversation with our friends about who we would like to become?
How can Facebook be used in real-world community organizing?
Does Facebook signal the death of privacy, or—perhaps worse yet—the death of our desire for privacy?
On Facebook, are we really being “interactive,” or is it more proper to say that we’re just being “inter-passive”?
Why are Facebook games so unusual, and why are so many people interested in sending virtual flowers and turning friends into zombies?
Everyone is on Facebook now, but isn’t Facebook still a different kind of thing for different generations?
How does Facebook blur the lines between personal and mass communications, and what does implications does this hold for privacy, community, and politics?

D. E. Wittkower is Lecturer in Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. He is also the editor of iPod and Philosophy.