Facebook ’ s Cloud Polis is built directly on its Users’ personal lives and their interest in each other ’ s personal lives. Its reserve currency is what the theory of symbolic interactionism in sociology calls the “ presentation of self-identity. ” <sup>48</sup> In the reconstruction of the social networks that link the social-psychological capital of hundreds of millions of people, Facebook represents a voluntary and highly limited simulation of human culture, and for this, it is a singular achievement. Whereas Wikipedia, for example, publicly automates topical consensus, Facebook captures that social capital and guards it from strangers, displaying it through limited interfacial prisms. In turn, it leverages that capture into metacapital to be sold to microtargeting advertisers. Facebook ’ s Cloud model is rendered in the cumulative captured graph of the lives, likes, and allegiances of its active users, who spend more time on Facebook than any other site, and who have amassed the largest single repository of mechanical images in human history on its servers. <sup>49</sup> Gabriel Tarde ’ s nineteenth-century dream, for a sociology based on diagramming society bit by bit from every microencounter until emergent patterns come into view, is suggested, if not also partially realized, by social network platforms such as these. <sup>50</sup> Just as for Google ’ s search algorithms, for Facebook ’ s social graph simulation, the index is the innovation. If the paradigmatic cultural energy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the invention of new media technologies and the exploration of these as vehicles to drive avant-garde forms of expression, then twenty-first century invention focuses instead on the scanning, archiving, cataloging, sorting, visualization, cutting and pasting, sensing, and serving rationalization and capitalization of archived reservoirs of content. Further, “ new content, ” like the billions of images uploaded to
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