With nearly two billion users, many of whom have been members of the platform for many years, most people have long forgoten what it felt like to become a member, how they became the friend that Facebook wanted them to be. Upon first registering with the site, the user is instantly faced with the imperative to add friends. Once a user chooses to set up an account, he is immediately prompted to start filling in the personal profile template. Users’ identities need to be defined within a fixed set of standards to be compatible with the algorithmic logic driving social software systems. If users could freely choose what they wish to say about themselves, there would be no real comparable or compatible data for the algorithms to process and work with. Without this orderly existence as part of the databases, our connections would not make much sense. After all, “data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer” (Manovich, 2001: 84). Being part of databases means more than simply belonging to a collection of data. It means being part of an ordered space, encoded according to a common scheme (Dourish, 2014). As Tarleton Gillespie (2014) points out, data always need to be readied before an algorithm can process them. Categorization is a powerful mechanism in making data algorithm-ready. “What the categories are, what belongs in a category, and who decides how to implement these categories in practice, are all powerful assertions about how things are and are supposed to be” (Bowker and Star, in Gillespie, 2014: 171). The template provided by Facebook upon signing in constitutes only one of many forms of categorization that help make the data algorithm-ready. The politics of categorization becomes most pertinent in questions concerning inclusion and exclusion. The recurring conflicts over breastfeeding images and Facebook’s nudity-detection systems—comprising both algorithms and human managers—represent a particularly long-lasting debate over censorship and platform policies (Arthur, 2012). The politics of categorization is not just a mater of restricting breastfeeding images but one that fundamentally links database architecture and algorithmic operations to subjectification.
To understand how sociality is programmed—that is, how friendships are programmatically organized and shaped, let us consider the ways in which the platform simulates existing notions of friendship. As theorists of friendship have argued, shared activity and history are important aspects of considering someone a friend (Helm, 2010). Simulating and augmenting the notion of a shared history, Facebook provides several tools and techniques dedicated to supporting memory. As poorly connected or unengaged users pose a threat to the platform’s conditions of existence, programming reasons for engagement constitutes a key rationale from the point of view of platforms. On Facebook, connecting users to potential friends provides the first step in ensuring a loyal user base, because friendships commit. Functioning as a memory device, algorithms and software features do not merely help users find friends from their past, they play an important part in maintaining and cultivating friendships, once formed. As such, a variety of features prompt users to take certain relational actions, the most well-known being that of notifying users about a friend’s birthday. While simulating the gesture of phatic communication represented in congratulating someone on his or her birthday, the birthdayreminder feature comes with an added benefit: The birthday feature is the most basic way of making users return to the platform, by providing a concrete suggestion for a communicative action to be performed. As I’ve described elsewhere, platforms like Facebook want users to feel invested in their relationships, so they are continually coming up with new features and functionalities that remind them of their social “obligations” as friends (Bucher, 2013).
Programmed Sociality
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