So, today we were discussing Facebook, the social networking site that all the cool kids use now that MySpace is (i) so like last week, and (ii) in the grip of the wickedest mogul in capitalism and driving everyone who tries to use it nuts with intrusive attempts at skimming money.

The more we talked about Facebook, the more remarkable I felt it was. It’s not the technology – which is neatly implemented, but already well matured. And it’s not the idea that it somehow represents a paradigm-shifting community – there are no communities online there are just collections of individuals passing through because in communities people have to live with the consequences of their actions, they can’t just walk away, pretend to be a twelve year old form Arkansas or shut it all down. An online community is as oxymoronic as a herd of cats.

No what struck me about Facebook was the way it turns the whole surveillance society argument on its head and illustrates a very interesting point about the writings of dead, French, bald philosopher Foucault.

But I’ll get to him in a minute.

Stop for a moment and listen carefully.

Do you hear that high pitched whine?

It’s not your computer fan.

No that’s proof of the fact that, no matter where you are now, you are living within hearing distance of some middle class “liberal” called Jeremy going on and on and on and on about CCTV cameras and speed cameras and rfid chips and and email snooping and store loyalty cards and brainwave measuring devices hidden in Kentucky Fried Chicken and how the “man” is watching us all the time and how the modern world is just exactly like Big Brother.

I’ve never been able to summon up the energy for this kind of paranoia/ego-mania.

I just can’t believe any one really cares what my view of the Iraq war is or that Jeremy goes a bit mad every Saturday night, shuts the curtains, smokes a bit of dope and masturbates furiously to pictures of maggot encrusted pork.

I don’t matter, I don’t think Jeremy matters and I doubt either of us get up anything remotely interesting to anyone in “authority”. But also I don’t buy the idea that some sort of surveillance society (or much of anything else) is being imposed upon us. We are, at the very least, complicit and many of us are actively encouraging the state and others to watch us more closely, which is where Facebook is going to come in, after I detour via Foucault.

In Foucault’s best books – his archaeologies of the medical profession, madness, prisons – he sets out to look at how knowledge and power become one thing.

In these histories he traces the way expertise held by particular groups comes to be valued and to shape not just institutions but the expectations of people of how the world should be and how knowledge comes to define the categories through which our socialised minds experience the world.

In his history of the medicalisation of society he looks at how phenomena that might once have been called, for example, evil spirits and been the subject of religious authority have been brought within the purview of medicine, doctors, hospitals, the medical establishment, health inspectors, local authorities, government departments etc. etc.

Foucault isn’t interested in whether a spirit or a bacteria causes a disease, and he isn’t interested in whether the two things are equivalent, he’s interested in how the understanding of these things shapes human society. It’s not that Foucault abandons objectivity – he’s not a post-modernist denying rationality in a Derridan way – but that everything, including our understanding of what rationality is and how that understanding helps shapes institutions in our collective lives – cannot be separated from the historical specifics of our age/culture/experience.

But no one person or group becomes independently powerful in Foucault’s vision – every actor in a society possesses both an element of power (although that’s obviously not to say that power is shared equally amongst actors) and a capacity to use it (although again, that capacity is not without restriction).

The medical profession doesn’t become powerful just because doctors decide they want respect, money and a nice holiday cottage in the Cotswolds.

As well as the desire for doctors to enhance their own status, the medical profession is dragged into positions of responsibility by people’s desire not to be sick and for their children to survive to adulthood, by governments who desire public support for their sponsoring of medical advances and a healthier population, by industry’s wish for a healthy workforce and by a host of other demands and interested parties, some of which may even drag doctors into positions they’d rather not find themselves.

So we see the growth of public medicine, of the spread of medical reasoning into our homes and private life, to the medicalisation of things like childbirth and body image, of data collection and monitoring on behalf of the state, even exercising quasi-legal powers over individuals who may be a risk to themselves or others.

The same kind of push/pull relationship is obvious in the growth of surveillance.

For every Jeremy whining about CCTV cameras there’s at least one person grateful for the extra security they provide. People want crime reduced, they want streets safe, they want other people controlled so they don’t just consent to control over themselves, they demand it, the force it to happen. Some policemen will welcome the power it provides, some will be appalled by it.

For every person complaining about how commercial companies are measuring us, collecting our preferences, weighing our interests, there are a host of others gobbling up the hybrid productes this creates.

But Facebook takes the individual’s complicity in the surveillance society to a new and altogether more intense level. This isn’t just people handing over the potential for surveillance to agencies outside their control in the pursuit of social/political/personal advancement. This is people acting as agents of surveillance on themselves – Facebookers put their whole lives online on their walls for everyone to see and some of them do it in compulsive, intimate detail.

David Brin’s book on the surveillance society, The Transparent Society, argued that in the new technological era we were going to have to get used to living in a world where privacy was impossible. Brin took some (grim) satisfaction from the fact that while our own lives may be laid bare, so would the lives of anyone who watched us – and that provided safeguards as well as threats.

But Facebook goes far, far beyond that transparent world.

This is people opening themselves to intimate scrutiny for entertainment.

We live in a world where people expect to be plugged into every detail of celebrities lives – and celebrities are no longer rarefied pop stars or movie stars – these days they’re anyone who can get anyone else to pay attention for long enough.

Facebook is the obvious extension of two hugely powerful trends. It is the transparent society taken to an unforeseeable level and it is Warhol’s “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” diluted and elongated to encompass a billion (okay, I exaggerate) Facebookers and their ilk.

Like bloggers?

Hmmm.

Come in, look around, see anything interesting? Help yourself! Stay awhile. Stay as long as you like. Just promise you won’t ignore me…