Facebook’s Cohesive Web and Postmodern Epistemology

Facebook’s vision is a cohesive web. A web where your identity, your social graph, and your preferences follow you everywhere you go – not just on Facebook, but across the whole internet.

This is significant. And it raises a philosophical question that I don’t think enough people are asking.

Postmodern epistemology – the study of how we know what we know in a postmodern context – suggests that knowledge is always situated. It depends on who is doing the knowing, from what position, with what assumptions.

Facebook’s cohesive web is a situated epistemology at scale. What you see is shaped by who you are, who you know, and what you’ve done before. Two people searching for the same thing get different results. Two people reading the same news get different stories.

This has enormous implications for public discourse, for shared reality, and for how communities form and fracture.

We’re building a web that is personalised, contextual, and social. That’s good in many ways. But we should be clear-eyed about what we’re giving up: a shared information commons that, however imperfect, pointed in the direction of shared truth.

The cohesive web is powerful. It’s also, in ways we don’t fully understand yet, dangerous.