Philosophy of Digital Man and Digital Society - 2024
Google and Facebook as a Way of Life for Millions in the Digital City
Directions for Implementing Foreign Experience in the Philosophy of Creative Cities
In just a few years, Google has transformed from a mere search engine into a force relied upon by millions who seek instructions, organize their schedules, utilize address books, access voicemail, make phone calls, watch videos, indulge in entertainment, and navigate the vast web. People download billions of applications and depend on Google’s assistance for tasks ranging from banking and cooking to archiving childhood photos, thereby enhancing their competencies.
Humanity connects to the Internet through laptops, mobile phones, iPads, devices, cable boxes, gaming consoles, television receivers, and digital media players like Apple TV. Billions share the most intimate details of their lives on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, gaining access to a "personal social network," personal and business emails, driven by our desire for interaction in social networks, where we receive information about our hopes, dreams, and desires from friends, relatives, and colleagues.
The image of the digital individual in the digital city involves their engagement with the technological attributes of contemporary digital society and the essential services of algorithmic culture, from which they are utterly dependent. Utilizing their digital devices, millions spend over five hours daily online. Social networks chronicle gatherings, graduation ceremonies, property acquisitions, the arrival of pets, marriages, divorces, births, and more. Social networks can serve as tools for geopolitical change, reflecting various events across the globe, while digital services can embody both good and evil forces.
The allure of these tools is evident, as most of us spend our leisure time scouring the Internet for music, recipes, investment advice, news, guidance, business opportunities, social gossip, and sports results. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok provide valuable services—email, news, videos, ad space, and photo storage—at no charge, in exchange for our personal information, thereby partially fulfilling our needs.
Today, Google has created a mapping service and gained the ability to track the places we visit; it can monitor every phone call, analyze voicemail messages with voice recognition and transcription, and trace every step if we carry a smartphone. Despite companies making substantial claims about their privacy policies, they possess a comprehensive portrait and detailed account of all that each of us does within our own universe. Thus, a person is not merely a client of Google but is, in fact, its complete product, as the company is committed to extracting the most significant volumes of information from each of us. Google processes around 24 petabytes daily—equivalent to 1 million gigabytes or thousands of terabytes—representing a possession of data that generates immense power. This speaks to the tremendous influence wielded by these platforms, necessitating the refinement of their technologies and data acquisition mechanisms.
At the heart of examining Google and Facebook as social phenomena representing the lifestyles of millions in the digital age is an informational method (M. Toffler, 2000), which has evolved alongside the digital city, viewed as high-tech due to new phenomena such as artificial intelligence, robotics, implanted technologies, new digital realities, pervasive computerization, the Internet of Things, the emergence of big data, artificial intelligence, decision-making, and 3D printing.
In studying Google and Facebook, we employ methods and principles from complexity theory, systemic, synergetic, and structural-functional methodologies as components of the analysis of the digital city. Structural-functional analysis allows us to consider the digital city as a complex, non-linear social system with multiple subsystems that continually interact with their environment, while the combination of synergetic and systemic methods elucidates the operational characteristics of the digital city through the examples of the Google and Facebook platforms.
Anthropological and socio-axiological approaches enable us to uncover the dimensions of the digital city, founded upon humanity, education, knowledge, and the movement of individuals toward a knowledge-based society and innovation.
Systemic analysis and synthesis play a crucial role in analyzing Google and Facebook as social phenomena. Systemic methodology offers a structured system and the ability to manage complex spheres of interdependent activity, facilitating the analysis of constituent components and their sequential integration.
The essence of the systemic approach encompasses:
- The formation of goals and clarification of hierarchy;
- The achievement of set goals with minimal expenditure through comparative analysis of alternative pathways and methods to achieve these goals, leading to informed choices;
- Quantitative assessment of goals based on a comprehensive evaluation of all possible developmental paths for the digital city and its platforms.
We concur with Oleg Maltsev's assertion that "the analysts’ work is to process all necessary information to propose some concept of further actions at the first level. The second level—information—entails gathering all accessible and less accessible data. We move further along the scale. At the third level, it is crucial to have our own apparatus capable of creating the conditions necessary for us in the market to realize our intentions. In the classical model, these three levels represent the keys to solving a problem in the market, essentially keys to resolving an equation." In this study, we adhere to a balance of coherence in analysis and synthesis, inductive and deductive models, as well as principles-postulates of the veracity of truth, which evolves as a dynamic force and source of all evolution.
The Place and Role of the Global Information System in the Creative City
The positive aspects of the global information system in the creative city are indisputable; thus, we have decided to explore the pros and cons of Facebook as a way of life for millions. The reciprocal connectivity facilitated by the Internet through its fundamental architecture means that people around the world can now unite into a digital society—an ontos-humanity—like never before. While the advantages of the online world are well-documented and frequently highlighted in the high-tech industry, there exists a counterpoint to this mutual attachment. Daily, more and more millions "connect" their everyday lives to the global information network, which simplifies and enhances human life without pause; yet, each individual must ask themselves what this truly signifies.
Simultaneously, Internet platforms like Facebook manipulate attention and harm millions, refusing to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, resorting to fictitious means of profiting from the most vulnerable aspects of human psychology, collecting and utilizing personal data, and developing business models that fail to protect citizens, ultimately leading to the degradation and destruction of the human psyche.
Network users must learn to adopt a skeptical stance toward beloved products that harm humanity, demanding accountability from platforms for the repercussions of their decisions and urging legislators to regulate their activities to safeguard societal interests. Indeed, digital technologies open doors to knowledge that previous generations could not access. Through digital technologies, humanity can achieve remarkable feats; however, all of this comes at a price. Digital technologies, beginning with television, alter the manner in which individuals engage with the world, shifting from passive consumption to active civic participation driven by ideas, while conversations evolve into communication within the digital sphere. Yet, information networks subtly transform us from citizens into consumers, as Facebook primarily operates as a business focused on maximizing profit, driven by a single entity.
Facebook stands as a colossal artificial intelligence that permeates every sphere of user activity, both in politics and beyond, continuously learning about each individual, its tools constantly refined into a formidable weapon. Experts posit that new digital technologies are neither inherently good nor bad; rather, their moral character hinges upon human utilization. Within this digital city, the boundary between the physical and the digital realms dissolves, blurred to the point where modern existence accumulates layers of information that elude our ordinary gaze. Yet, donning augmented reality glasses unveils a sea of personalized, interactive data.
As the evolution of this issue reveals, the advent of Web 2.0 has bestowed upon us multimedia content, interactive advertising, and social networks. Thanks to the coherence of high-speed 5G, augmented reality devices, trillions of sensors, and powerful artificial intelligence, the capacity to overlay digital imagery upon our physical surroundings has emerged. Virtual reality presents an artificially reproduced sphere—a continuum—through which individuals can engage in discourse, contemplating their presence within the digital milieu.
Certain companies introduce a function known as "visual search," transposing us into a new matrix of audiovisual reality where individuals communicate with like-minded peers and with affectively artificial types and subjects. In 2017, Google launched its visual search system, Google Lens, which not only identifies purchasable items but also deciphers the entirety of our surroundings. The competition among companies has propelled the pace of development in information and communication technologies to a qualitatively new level.
By late 2018, the number of visual search systems surpassed a billion, giving rise to diverse citizen preferences. Today, the digital reality itself transforms into a marketplace, evolving into interdynamic and interrevolutionary systems that foster correlational relationships, which are objectively metabolized, thereby enhancing services of which individuals remain largely unaware. The impending digital transformations pose a grave threat to traditional advertisers while simultaneously offering numerous advantages to consumers within the new informational landscape of the global digital system.
The acceleration of digital technology development is part of our marathon towards "computational welfare and prosperity." Already underway is the process of demonetization, where affordable electricity provides us with clean water; autonomous vehicles unlock environmentally friendly transportation and affordable housing. The convergence of artificial intelligence, 5G, and augmented/virtual reality is reshaping new models (sub-models) of inexpensive education and healthcare, constituting the matrix of the digital city, through which the world becomes a better place.
Facebook as a Powerful Economic Engine in the Digital City
At its inception, Facebook was envisioned as a platform of global significance, poised to transform the world for the better through digital technologies, effortlessly amassing 100 million users and heralding immense success. However, its founders could scarcely fathom that this success could yield consequences beyond mere happiness. Facebook emerged during a time when the creation of powerful technological enterprises became possible, and no nation could escape their influence. Yet, few could predict that such success would have a reverse effect, leading to manipulative technologies that influence human behavior.
In this context, Facebook possessed two substantial advantages over prior social networks: by insisting on authentic identity, it allowed users to control their self-presentation. Consequently, for businesses, promoting offers on Facebook became an undeniable triumph, resulting in a surge of users engaged in digital modes, broadening their horizons and deepening emotional engagement, perceptions, imagination, and interpretation of the information models within the digital city. Thanks to its open promotional strategies, Facebook experienced a genuine boom in user numbers, rekindling investor confidence. Within a mere eight and a half years, Facebook evolved into a powerful economic engine, continuously updating its algorithms, while companies profited from advertising and eventually began trading on their platforms. Since 2012, the introduction of ads in news feeds has made targeted advertising considerably more viable, progressively refined across various temporal continuums.
Facebook elucidates opportunities for personalization, interactivity, and information dissemination among users, facilitating the formation of groups that manifest in projections of verbal-optical dialogues alongside computer-generated holograms—schematic poly-models. As 2.2 billion individuals monthly click links, share messages, and circulate comments about themselves and their loved ones, with 1.47 billion engaging weekly, the cumulative effect of Facebook's artificial intelligence reveals more about its users than they themselves might conceive. Simultaneously, all this information, aggregated in one place, could attract malicious actors, even if well-secured. However, the essence of Facebook's business models lies in the fact that anyone willing to pay for this privilege could exploit such data.
Platforms now vie for the attention of the user’s "autonomous simulacrum," to which artificial intelligence appeals, presenting content designed to engage the brain's emotions. Most advantageous for Facebook is that an outraged user, swayed by emotion, reacts even more vigorously to emotionally charged content. Facebook, possessing deep knowledge of each user, is adept at curating news feeds to amplify the emotional reactions of the "autonomous simulacrum." Within this creative city, individuals organize themselves into projections of virtual artifacts—forming groups typically comprising family, friends, and Facebook communities as dichotomous computer-generated duplicates of reality to which we belong.
Social networks facilitate the expansion of friendship circles, cultivating a remarkably diverse community, while the news feed allows users to surround themselves with like-minded individuals. When we receive content from our peers—be it family, friends, or groups—we tend to lower our defenses, a significant reason why misinformation spreads so actively on Facebook. The platform enables the creation of groups dedicated to nearly everything: hobbies, entertainment, teams, communities, churches, celebrities, and politics in all its diversity. Facebook favors groups as they simplify targeting for advertisers, a preference shared by malicious actors for the same reasons.
Research indicates that when discursively inclined individuals engage in discussions regarding various issues, their perspectives tend to radicalize over time, with irrational validity constraining the identity of discursive reality. Facebook seeks to persuade us that it merely serves as a platform for others, bearing no responsibility for the actions of third parties. Analysis shows that today there are more mobile phones than people, and they have become an inseparable part of everyone’s lives, effectively replacing cameras, computers, calculators, calendars, address books, radios, televisions, and games. This device constantly resides in our bags or pockets, acting as a genuine beacon that provides an uninterrupted stream of data about us—our locations, where we have been, whom we have communicated with, how we have spent our time, which photos we have uploaded, and our passions—essentially all the information regarding our lifestyles.
Thus, we represent Google and Facebook as reflections of the lifestyles of millions in a digital city that constitutes linguistic interpretations, modifications, and illusory communications about the virtual world in which individuals are immersed.
Values Promoted on Facebook
In truth, Facebook has constructed and maintains a complex digital structure centered around a value system that increasingly conflicts with the values of its users. Facebook asserts that users have full control over their experiences, selecting their friends and the resources that populate their news feeds; however, in reality, this control is an illusion crafted by engineers through artificial intelligence, algorithms, and menus that govern every step of an individual's experience. The competition for attention among media and a vast array of technologies shapes an artificial culture and manifests social behaviors.
As analysis has demonstrated, radical views attract more consumer attention, prompting platforms to recommend such content. Filters assist news feeds in retaining consumer attention more effectively. Within the confines of filter bubbles, individuals, regrettably, become increasingly prone to clannishness, isolation, and radicalism, which engulf both people and the ideas with which they feel comfortable. Indeed, the internet allows for the expression of the most socially unacceptable ideas, making radical voices resonate louder than moderate ones, while online platforms that impose no restrictions encourage hateful expressions, thereby allowing this domain to be experienced from within, resting upon the continuum of digital society.
Internet platforms also mislead by frequently employing the rhetoric of free speech to defend their business practices, inflating radicalism in various ways, thereby enabling individuals to become recipients of such discourse. Extremists often find each other and create an illusion of legitimacy between virtual and concretely real social worlds.
The protection against the stigmatization of the real world elevates communication among extremists on internet platforms to a more dangerous level, with algorithms compelling some users to think in increasingly radical terms. Filter bubbles prolong users’ time spent on websites, subsequently increasing platform revenues. Within these bubbles, users fabricate an alternative reality built around shared values—political, religious, or otherwise—encountering a stark outline of an "upside-down ontology."
In the context of the values propagated on Facebook, the group is of paramount importance, permitting anything deemed necessary for its development. It appears that such values serve as a foundation for democracy, powerless against the flavor bubbles that have emerged during the protracted evolution of society. Facebook, as a panorama of virtual reality, today stands as an ideal incubator for bubbles that have burst, leaving nothing in their wake. Malefactors seek to manipulate individuals within this realm of sympathies, facilitating entry into specific groups, devising the right triggers, thus clearing the path to garner attention. Users of social networks sometimes perceive the ideas presented by platforms as their own, representing them as something authentically virtual, akin to a hologram within the regulatory digital space.
A variety of tools exist through which digital platforms manipulate user choices. Some of these relate to the platform’s interface design, news feed, or notifications. Facebook maintains that users control everything, yet this is an illusion, and preserving this illusion is fundamental to the success of any platform. Thus, despite our distrust, Facebook operates particularly insidiously. Furthermore, development teams actively utilize “secret templates” to achieve desired outcomes, subtly prompting certain actions. The terms of service provided by Facebook have a singular objective: to shield the company from legal liability.
Another tool from Facebook's arsenal is the "bottomless bowl" of the news feed, which is infinite, leading millions to lose sleep as they become engrossed in videos, check Instagram, or browse Facebook. Messages are a means by which platforms exploit the most vulnerable aspects of human psychology, engaging users through simple actions that are costly, initiating a process for which a higher price must ultimately be paid, revealing the true cost of participation in this process. We behave as though these messages are entirely personal, forgetting that they are generated automatically and are often imposed by digital platforms.
To utilize your mobile data, Google developed the Android operating system for mobile phones and provided it to developers and users at no charge. Android software, along with your mobile number, supplies Google with information regarding the network, device location, call logs, and contact lists, while also granting access to a suite of sensor systems capable of tracking your movements, determining location, and even gauging the surrounding temperature, humidity, and noise levels.
For instance, as early as 2013, Facebook announced that the number of its monthly mobile users had reached 945 million and that 53% of its revenue derived from mobile advertising, amounting to billions of dollars, as noted by Mark Goodman. Shortly thereafter, not only was a superior interface developed, but a new tool was also created to extract greater volumes of data from users’ mobile devices. Oleg Maltsev and Elizabeth Haas Ederstein note in their engaging dialogue that "the management of information services is not solely about money; there is something that precedes it. The paramount concern should be how to improve people's lives." Regrettably, not everyone adopts such an approach, exacerbating existing problems. Thus, the values propagated on Facebook depend on the ontologically social activity of individuals in correlation with their creative actions, and for Facebook, this translates into revenue from network usage.
Facebook Technologies
Some of the technological strategies involve persuasion, as everyone seeks validated responses from others. The like button has become significant precisely due to our need for social approval, and Facebook’s currency lies in users’ attention. Social approval has its counterpart—reciprocity. Millions of users exchange likes and friend requests daily, often unaware that platforms orchestrate such behavior from above. The designation of "friend" in a photograph represents a potent form of recognition, initiating a cycle of reciprocity. The act of “adding friends” marked a pivotal moment for Facebook, as every tagged photo serves as a source of data and metadata regarding location, activity, and friends—all of which can be utilized for effective advertising targeting.
Business decisions on the internet platform Facebook are imbued with insidious technologies of persuasion. These platforms exert immense effort to expand their user base, yet they scarcely regard users as individuals; participation on these platforms equates to an automatic endorsement of their rules. Few possess the fortitude to resist the "temptations" of persuasive technologies in such a context, prompting us to either minimize stimuli or completely evade them. Each element of these technologies serves as a mechanism to deceive the user.
The challenges posed by internet platforms on smartphones extend beyond mere addiction; they sully the public sphere, amplifying negative voices at the expense of positive ones. From its inception, Facebook’s internet culture has championed free speech and autonomy. While this freedom may have functioned on a small scale, the architects of the worldwide web failed to foresee how, on a global scale, the dynamics would shift detrimentally for public discourse. Platform leaders prohibited hate speech within the framework of their service offerings, thereby absolving themselves of legal responsibility.
Nevertheless, the interplay among platforms facilitates the machinations of malefactors. They disseminate their antics, misinformation, and conspiracy theories on fringe sites where the most radical expressions rage, inciting outrage in the press and contributing to the degradation of public discourse. This scenario is compounded by a lack of prohibitions on non-violent expressions, insufficient protection for users, and a pressing need for companies to learn how to contain emotional contagion before it inflicts significant damage, while also embracing social responsibility for users’ actions. Recently, Facebook has begun insisting that hundreds of millions of mobile app users accept its new “Photo Sync” option, designed to automatically import every photo taken with their phones onto the social network’s servers.
Facebook wields significant influence over democracy, transforming technology from a mere tool that serves humanity into an entity that frequently undermines progress. Technological innovations deploy various psychological tactics to capture user attention, particularly affecting those most vulnerable to such strategies—children.
It is unsurprising that today children are being diagnosed with far more medical conditions related to technology use. Internet platforms, video games, and deceptive messages breed a myriad of problems that ensnare individuals far more tightly than analogous products did two decades ago. People of all ages spend an immeasurable amount of active time each day on internet platforms. Children aged 8 to 18 spend an average of 9.5 hours daily in front of screens, with 7.5 hours dedicated to television, computer games, and gaming consoles, while an additional 90 minutes are spent messaging and 30 minutes on phone calls.
The issue of excessive media consumption is not new, but social media applications on smartphones have escalated its consequences to a new level. The convenience and overwhelming experience of smartphone use enable app developers to replicate the very addiction elicited by slot machines and video games, monopolizing users’ attention. Contemporary smartphones and internet platforms are refined through the principles of humane design.
Thus, the problem of Facebook is fundamentally a problem of humanity. In 1998, Google’s initial mission was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Facebook articulated its mission as “giving people the power to make the world open and connected.” Unfortunately, Facebook’s mission statement today appears myopic, as the company has achieved material success through its founders while inflicting numerous adverse effects upon its users.
Consequently, Facebook and Google have exported quintessentially American values—self-centered consumption and societal fragmentation—across the globe. Automation and artificial intelligence have evolved into manipulative forces, on one hand providing the illusion of power, while on the other deepening the flaws inherent in democracy, resulting in citizens losing their ability to think independently. Malefactors have exploited every opportunity provided by Facebook and Google to disseminate misinformation and hateful rhetoric, thereby influencing citizens during elections.
Through the platforms of Facebook and Google, these malefactors have sought to dismantle democracy, civil rights, privacy, public health, and innovation, while the platforms themselves have borne responsibility for the extensive harm inflicted upon ordinary citizens. After all, democracy relies on the exchange of information, facts, and values; yet, as a result, the economics of journalism has been shattered, and the market has become inundated with information.
Information and misinformation on Facebook appear indistinguishable; however, misinformation generates greater revenue, making it more readily accepted. Facebook’s algorithms favor extreme messages over neutral ones, prioritizing misinformation over facts and conspiracy theories over verifiable truths. Facebook undermines democracy by disallowing discussions, debates, and the pursuit of common ground in viewpoints and values.
The design of these platforms is such that they are susceptible to abuse; every action within the platform is governed by the terms of service, with the platform’s primary priority being profit. Facebook adheres to corporate standards that, in most cases, reflect the interests of the powerful, while the demands of ordinary individuals are relegated in favor of those who are aggrieved.
In 2016, during the presidential elections, the rule of law was breached, making the threat to democracy a tangible concern. Facebook has been accused of allowing manipulative artificial intelligence to share user information with third-party companies, thereby violating privacy and resulting in millions of user profiles compromised by malefactors.
Facebook remains both a threat to and an impediment for innovation, as years are required to regulate innovation effectively. In its current operational model, Facebook exhibits more deficiencies than advantages. Yet, the leadership at Facebook views the unification of 2.2 billion people into a single network as the platform’s greatest asset, which has spawned the phenomenon of tribalism—the inclination to unite into groups based on territorial, cultural, religious, political, and other interests, fostering hostility toward those who do not share their concerns.
Today, Facebook has assumed a role traditionally reserved for governments within states, yet, unlike democratically elected governments, the platform is unaccountable to its consumers or the countries it influences. Perhaps therein lies its purpose.