The-Governmentality-of-Facebook-Nick-Howlett-2016

© Copyright 2016 Nick Howlett, School of Humanities, Language and Social Science, Griffith University 1
Making one’s face appear in the other’s presence: the governmentality of Facebook
Michel Foucault described his own work as “philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of
problems” (Foucault in Sauter 2014, p. 824). Using Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, this paper
will critically examine the social networking service (SNS) Facebook, invoking the spirit of Foucault’s
method to historically preface an account of the platform as a ‘technology of the self’, a set of
techniques that Facebook users govern themselves with, and in turn are governed by. Beginning with an
examination of the concept that gave rise to SNSs, Web 2.0, it will then look at Facebook as an instance
of the trends denoted by the Web 2.0 phenomenon. The discussion will then move to the insights (and
limitations) of the research literature on self-formation and SNSs, and their applicability to Facebook.
Finally, this paper will propose Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ as a better model for
conceiving of self-formation on Facebook.
Starting in the early 2000s, the shift in the development of the Internet commonly referred to as ‘Web
2.0’ has foregrounded the agency of the Internet user within the medium itself, and to a lesser extent,
within theoretical considerations of the Internet. The concept was brought to prominence by Tim
O’Reilly (2005), who described it thus:
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are
those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a
continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data
from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a
form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of
participation”, and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.
(O’Reilly 2005)
Further on in the same article, O’Reilly describes how the dominant trend of Web 2.0’s “architecture of
participation” is the value added by users. By implication, the ‘value’ of Web 2.0 is created by Internet
companies’ capitalisation on the free labour and data provided by users. Individual users create their
own content and manage their own information and behaviour online, in the process producing a
network effect where “unique, hard-to-recreate data sources… get richer as more people use them”
(Newman et al 2016, p. 591).
Among scholars, there is little agreement on a standard definition of Web 2.0. An interrogation of the
discursive claims invoked by its proponents is therefore warranted, as these have a bearing on the social

conduct of individuals on SNSs (as will be discussed presently). Some critics see its invocation as an
attempt at legitimating a business-focused framing of the Internet. Allen (2013, p. 260) describes Web
2.0 as a “discourse of versions” envisaged to suit the interests of venture capitalists like O’Reilly, and a
“rhetorical technology” (2013, p. 264) that aims to inscribe a normative framing of the future direction
of the Internet desired by technology companies. Fuchs (2010, p. 179) views Web 2.0 as another
iteration of Manuel Castells (2000)’s notion of ‘informational capitalism’, the competitive jostling of
Internet companies as they seek to exploit the dialectic between technology and capital to their
commercial advantage.
Viewed critically, O’Reilly’s formulation looks like a somewhat self-serving act of historicity, a grab-
bag of Internet phenomena that existed prior to the year 2000. For example, user-generated content was
not a novel development: the initial wave of user-generated content began with free website hosting
services Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire, which launched in 1994, 1995 and 1996, respectively (Milian
2009, angelfire.lycos.com n.d., tripod.lycos.com n.d.). Likewise, the participatory culture of the Internet
had its beginnings in online communities like the WELL (the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) which
began in 1985; which was where the term “virtual community” was invented (The WELL, n.d.). Social
networking also predates Web 2.0: an early SNS called sixdegrees launched in 1997 and “allowed users
to create profiles, list their friends, and add friends-of-friends to their own lists” (Boyd and Ellison in
Kietzmann et al. 2011, p. 242), a full eight years before Facebook launched. Of course, the need for
individuals to create their own meanings and to be social has much deeper historical roots:
The need for sociality and networking did not arise with the Internet, the Web or Facebook. If
anything, that need is an integral part of human life. But through history this need has been
reflected in a variety of media technologies, from spoken and written language, to print, film,
radio and television to the Internet and other digital media, each creating their own communicative
space with different limitations and opportunities. (Brügger 2015)
Regardless of how we choose to construe the discursive rhetoric and the less-than-meticulous
historicism of Web 2.0, it is still a useful marker of the Internet paradigm shift that began in the mid-
2000s. Since it was first popularised, the term has used to encompass technologies like cloud computing
and targeted advertising; trends such as social media, the market dominance of Internet companies like
Google, Facebook and Twitter, and even the ‘big data’ phenomenon, the enormous data sets generated
via user interactions with Internet platforms (Newman et al. 2016, pp. 592-593). This development has
profoundly influenced how we use and think about the Internet and has produced a host of “new social
practices and new forms of knowledge exchange” (Song 2010, p. 250). Perhaps the principal exemplars
are social networking services (SNSs). Utilising two of Web 2.0’s central innovations, platforms and

network effects, SNSs have evolved “to transform the social, political and informational practices of
individuals and institutions across the globe” (Vallor 2016).
In more ways than one, Facebook epitomises the Web 2.0 network effect described by Newman et al.
above, of “unique, hard-to-recreate data sources… [that] get richer as more people use them” (2016, p.
591). The largest SNS, it has grown to become a significant global mass communication medium in its
own right within the relatively short space of time since it opened for business in 2004. Now one of the
five largest corporations in the world, the size of its user base parallels its economic clout, and although
not quite omnipresent, it exerts a powerful influence on the societies it operates in right down to the
level of the individual user.
Facebook has the largest number of users of all SNSs. As of 30 June 2016, it had 1.71 billion monthly
active users or MAUs (Facebook 2016a), a measure Facebook defines as
a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile
device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30
days as of the date of measurement (Facebook 2016b, p. 35).
Facebook has 18% of the total global SNS audience, according to another estimate of SNS market share
(Chaffey 2016); the company says that 84.5% of these users are outside of the US and Canada
(Facebook 2016c). The next two largest SNSs in Chaffey (2016)’s rankings are WhatsApp (11%) and
Facebook Messenger (9.5%), also owned by Facebook (Facebook 2016b, p. 5). Facebook also owns
photo-sharing Instagram app (Facebook 2016b, p. 5), which has 4% market share according to Chaffey
(2016)’s rankings. Altogether, Facebook’s SNSs account for 42.5% of the global SNS audience.
In terms of economic power, Facebook is also the largest SNS, with a market capitalisation on 30 June
2016 of US$326.9 billion (YCharts 2016), equal in size to the 32nd largest national economy in the
world, Egypt, which has a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$330.8 billion (World Bank 2016).
Facebook’s market capitalisation makes it the fourth largest company in the world, behind fellow
technology companies Alphabet (US$547.1B), Apple (US$529.3B) and Microsoft (US$425.7B) (Levy
2016).
In a material sense, Facebook is a scaffold: it provides an unfurnished digital space for networked social
relations to occur (Brügger 2015). This space is filled with content — text, pictures, video, sound,
advertising, and most importantly, links to other content outside of the Facebook platform — that are all
supplied by users, and to a lesser extent, by those who wish to market to them. The content provided by
users is served up to other users by Facebook’s proprietary, opaque algorithms. “Substantially all” of
Facebook’s revenue comes from selling advertising to marketers; in 2015, 95% of its US$17.93B

revenue came from selling advertising (Facebook 2016b, p. 8). Targeted access to Facebook’s users
based on their “age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors” (Facebook 2016b, p. 5) is what marketers
are buying when they purchase advertising on the platform.
As Facebook readily admits in its 2015 Annual Report, its users are highly valuable to the company:
“the size of our user base and our users’ level of engagement are critical to our success” (Facebook
2016b, p. 8). The value of each active user of Facebook can be calculated by dividing Facebook’s
market capitalisation of US$326.9 billion by its 1.71 billion MAUs, which gives an approximate value
per user of US$191.
These figures illustrate Facebook’s enormous market presence. The network effect it has created has
attracted (and continues to attract) large numbers of users. Without offering a full exposition here of all
of the technological features of Facebook that have enabled this rapid expansion (see Brügger 2015 for
an elaboration of this), it is clear that the platform has been successful because it has “redefined the
social topography of the Internet by enabling users to build increasingly seamless connections between
their online social presence and their existing social networks offline” (Vallor 2016).
SNSs evolved from earlier forms of Internet user practices, as noted earlier. In the next section, this
paper will examine the existing research literature relating to Web 2.0, SNSs and subjectivity and
review the themes of this research for insights that may help explain self-formation on Facebook.
The bulk of previous social sciences research on Web 2.0 has focused on the large content-producing
companies (Blank and Reisdorf 2012, p. 541). This is an oversight, given the centrality of user-created
content and participation to the concept of Web 2.0. However, as social networking has evolved into a
global mass communications phenomenon, the number of studies of user practices on SNSs has begun
to grow. For the most part, this research has dealt with users of SNSs Facebook and Twitter, reflecting
their size and cultural significance. Most of the Facebook and Twitter studies have been concerned with
the psychological well-being (for example, Kim and Lee 2011), or the sociology (for example, Song
2010) of users.
A much smaller subset of the research has offered theories about power and subjectivity on SNSs, for
example Andrejevic (2011), Flisfeder (2015) and Fuchs (2014). However, these have tended to fall into
a binary opposition of power as being either generated from the ‘bottom-up’—by users—or exercised
from the ‘top-down’ by the companies that own the SNSs. Accounts supporting the former position
usually replicate (to varying degrees) the computer industry’s techno-optimist rhetoric, lauding SNSs as

participatory communities that devolve democratic power to their users. The contrasting top-down
position is more mindful of the industry origins of the techno-optimist discourse and instead interrogates
the massive economic and political power vested in SNSs like Facebook, advancing the position that
SNSs are corporate tools designed to dominate and control their users (Fuchs 2015, p. 1).
Neither position adequately explains subjectivity in terms of the tensions and constraints inherent in this
new form of networked agency, making both positions highly problematic. Bottom-up explanations
largely ignore how the technical and discursive limitations imposed by SNSs also play a role in forming
the conduct of users, while top-down explanations tend to disregard how the conduct of users of SNSs is
often at odds with the commercial imperatives of the SNSs’ corporate owners. Additionally, neither
standpoint gives a historically grounded account of the practices of self-formation on SNSs. Their
reliance on the binary logic of communications theories developed to study traditional ‘one-to-many’
media may hinder their ability to interpret the ‘many-to-many’—or even the ‘network-to-network’—
subjectivities operating within SNSs.
Novel approaches are required that can countenance SNSs as a new phenomenon, part of Web 2.0’s
“conceptual shift away from linear models… (from producer to consumer) and structural models of
power toward complex and dynamic systems of culture, knowledge, and control” (Hartley, Burgess and
Bruns, in eds. Hartley, Burgess and Bruns 2013, p. 7). At the same time, though, there is a need to
acknowledge the connectedness of user practices on SNSs to the wider cultural and historical context of
self-formation.
Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” (Foucault 2000, in Rabinow 2000, p. 300) is an
approach that can be readily adapted to explain subjectivity on Facebook. Foucault sees a “strong
linkage between power and processes of subjectification”, and believes it is “not possible to study the
technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them” (Lemke 2001,
p. 50). He uses the term ‘governmentality’ to bind together the idea of ‘governing’ (in a sense more akin
to ‘conducting’ oneself and/or others) with the mental habits and processes that form subjectivity. In
Foucault’s words, ‘governmentality’ is a broad-ranging concept, implying
the relationship of the self to itself, and I intend this concept of ‘governmentality’ to cover the
whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that
individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other. Those who try to control,
determine, and limit the freedom of others are themselves free individuals who have at their
disposal certain instruments they can use to govern others. Thus, the basis for all this is freedom,

the relationship of the self to itself and the relationship to the other (Foucault 2000, in Rabinow
2000, p. 300).
Foucault’s notion of governmentality considers subjectivity within a matrix of what he refers to as
“technologies”:
(1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2)
technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification;
(3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain
ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit
individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations
on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves
in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.
(Foucault, in Martin 1988, p. 18).
Moreover, these four ‘technologies’ are usually coterminous, and each comes with its own conditions of
domination, which make different contributions to the formation of skills and attitudes in individuals
(Foucault, in Martin 1988, p. 18). Foucault thus links the ways that individuals govern their own
behaviour—“technologies of the self”—with the techniques and “instruments” of others who may seek
to dominate or control them.
One can see how Foucault’s ambiguously defined “technologies of the self” may be applied to describe
any situation where a subject constitutes him or herself through interactions with external influences or
through processes of self-formation. In this way, the concept of governmentality can account for the
formation of subjectivity both from the ‘bottom-up’, i.e. through the self, and the ‘top-down’, i.e. in
terms of how the ‘technologies of power’ act on or produce the thinking or conduct of the subject.
Foucault describes this as the ‘agonistic’ relationship of the governed and the governing—a dynamic,
fragmentary space, full of tensions.
An important aspect of Foucault’s work on governmentality seeks to relate instances of self-formation to
their antecedents within a genealogy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and the Romans, whom he
notes saw self-formation as the ethical responsibility of every citizen:
“Care for the self” in the Greek and Roman worlds was the deliberate effort to construct an ethical
self and was highly valued and encouraged… It was only later, when doctrines, fundamental
principles and other prescribed rules of conduct began to dominate the constitution of the subject,
that care for the self started being equated with egoistic self-love (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p.
400).
Later, the task of self-transformation was appropriated by institutions such as religion so that by the time
the Christian monastic tradition arose, care of the self had become a ritual of self-denunciation and self-

denial centred around the individual’s need to submit to God, where it was the individual’s role to police
the self
to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to
disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and hence to bear public or
private witness against oneself (Foucault 1988, p.40).
Into the Enlightenment and then into modernity, when the technology of the self of the confessional is
gradually replaced by human-centred technologies of the self, such as the theatrical monologue or the
written self-reflection, a symbolic barrier is crossed. For the first time, “the relationship of the self to
itself” (Foucault in Rabinow 2000, p. 300) crosses into the realm of the social, as the “gaze of the other”
is invited or imagined (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p. 403). With the arrival of “the choosing,
deciding, shaping human being who aspires to be the author of his or her own life” (Beck in Bakardjieva
and Gaden 2011, p. 404), self-formation becomes an identity performance, a biographical process
involving the constant rewriting of oneself in the public gaze (Sauter 2014, p. 823).
Thus the stage is now set for the technology of the self in its next iteration—the Internet. Where the
traditional media brings the global to the local subject, the Internet reverses the flow, so that the local
subject is able to insert themselves into the global (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p. 404). The arrival of
Web 2.0, as we have seen, adds to this an “architecture of participation” (O’Reilly 2005), and SNSs like
Facebook elaborate this further by providing a platform for the networked performance of self-
formation. We turn now to give a Foucaultian account of governmentality on Facebook using Foucault’s
‘technology of self’ as a heuristic device.
Facebook provides a range of techniques with which its users govern themselves and are in turn
governed by. As outlined above, Facebook operates as a framework that users populate with words, text,
videos and links to other networks. Among the two main Facebook features that individuals use to
constitute themselves on the platform are the personal user profile and the News Feed. Filling out and
adding content to their own profile, users forms themselves piece-by-piece on the Facebook platform in
a practice of “technologised self-writing” (Sauter 2014, p. 829). The new affordance of the Facebook
status update shares features with earlier ‘confessional’ modes of self-writing but offers new
possibilities also. Brief and to-the-point, the status update efficiently reveals something of the self,
allows for reflection on daily occurrences, yet can be edited or even deleted at any future point if the
writer so chooses. It is a public act of self-inscription, that, to borrow from Foucault, makes the

individual’s own “face appear in the other’s presence” (Foucault in Sauter 2014, p. 831) almost
instantaneously.
Another technological affordance that Facebook has added recently is the ability for users to place
markers of their current geographic location while using the platform, using the GPS (Global
Positioning System) of their mobile device or computer. These markers have a performative, as well as a
locational role; when a user adds their location by ‘checking in’, their activity is posted to their friends’
News Feed, and is another way of self-inscribing in front of the public gaze, of visibly self-forming
before others (Sauter 2014, p. 832).
Each data point that the user creates is stored in another new Facebook profile feature, the Timeline,
which sequentially records and displays every ‘like’, shared post, interest, photo, video and geographical
check-in that the user performs on the platform. The Timeline feature affords the user the ability to go
back and review each piece of information they have inscribed on Facebook, one at a time. Actions can
be performed on each individual data point on the Timeline, including deleting, hiding or making shared
items more visible to others. In this way, shared items about the self can be edited to modify their
presentation to others post factum. The Timeline and the check-in feature are just two examples of
processes of self-formation available to users of Facebook: there are numerous others.
While these practices may constitute a liberatory and self-actualizing experience for users, even the
smallest user interaction with the Facebook platform generates data that can be mined, commodified and
monetised by Facebook. This is the ‘technology of power’ of Facebook, the juncture at which the
subject is objectified and governed by the structure of the medium. The engaged user has “very little
recourse against the on-going appropriation of their self-expression into new advertising mechanisms
which translate every interest and experience shared by them into a potential consumption trigger”
(Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p. 407). If user data are the building blocks of Facebook’s economy, the
currency offered in exchange for this labour of the self is not “moral guidance, pardon or salvation”
(Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p. 410), but popularity. Facebook encourages continuous self-reflection
by affording seemingly endless opportunities to self-engage and to conduct relationships with others.
“Users respond to this technological affordance by creating a permanent record of their actions, which
helps them to manage their conduct and establish guidelines to live by” (Sauter 2014, p. 832).
As we saw in the Web 2.0 section, implicit in the Web 2.0 discourse is the dominant rationality of
creators of the discourse, the Internet industry. As a technology of the self, for the self, like Web 2.0,
Facebook also carries within it the dominant ‘technologies of sign systems’ of the Internet industry. As
Foucault noted, these technologies occupy the same space. The “channeling of the labor of [Facebook’s]

users into monetary flows and capitalist business practices means one thing: the unprecedented blending
of technologies of production and technologies of the self” (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p. 408).
Facebook users are not rendered completely powerless by this mode of governmentality, however. Users
have “the liberty to make informed choices and negotiate the terms of their self constitution and
interaction with others” (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2011, p. 411. Users can choose to resist or ignore the
dominant commercial discourse built into Facebook, for example by using advertising- or script-
blocking software. Or users may alter their conduct on the platform by using false names or images,
omitting information or restricting the extent of their self-constitution practices on Facebook (Vallor
2016); these techniques may circumvent Facebook’s attempts to gather data for its own purposes.
Facebook is a product of the Web 2.0 era, both materially and rhetorically. Inscribed within its
networked structure are the rhetoric and the social practices ushered in by Web 2.0. Facebook has
successfully harnessed these practices to become the largest SNS and a global communications
phenomenon itself. Central to Facebook’s commercial success are the self-formation practices of more
than 1.7 billion individual users. Binary oppositions of power relations conceived to describe earlier
communication mediums are inadequate for describing social networks of Facebook’s scale and
complexity; moreover, they can’t account for the convergence of networked subject formation and
capitalist business practice unique to SNSs. The concept of governmentality as conceived by Michel
Foucault is a better analytical tool for theorizing about self-formation on Facebook; it provides a
genealogical background to the practices of self-formation prevalent amongst users of the platform, and
can also be extended to describe how power is formed by the novel interplay between networked
subjectivity and Facebook’s technologies of production. When considered through a governmentality
lens, it becomes clear that Facebook can be used as a technology of the self in ways that may elude or
even impede Facebook’s commercial objectives.

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