In Social Media and Morality, Lisa S. Nelson argues for a new approach to the study of social networking technologies, one that emphasizes their mediating effect on humans with consequences for “how and why we make the moral decisions we do” (p. 89). Nelson’s work here is based in post-phenomenology, and includes careful discussion of relevant issues and research from both theoretical and legal perspectives. She draws on the fields of political science, philosophy, law, media studies, and others, which, along with its topical nature, gives this book broad, interdisciplinary relevance.

After the introduction lays out the stakes and structure of the book, Nelson uses the first substantive chapter to create space for her questions about “the moral significance of social networking technologies” by first teasing out the political significance of these technologies that have dominated much of the research thus far (p. 27). In the chapters that follow, Nelson explains her methodological approach for “evaluating the moral significance of our new forms of communication technologies” (p. 6), which starts from the phenomenological understanding that humans and technologies interact with and are changed by each other (p. 4). Chapters 3 through 6 elaborate different aspects of this approach (human agency, time, identity, and regulatory responses) using a number of thinkers and real-world examples. The organization of the book is clear, and supports the argument that Nelson puts forward.

Nelson makes a number of strong contributions to the study of social media, and I want to focus on three in particular. First, throughout the book Nelson works to both break down the idea of the “autonomous moral subject” (p. 16), and to elaborate the positive consequences of doing so. Nelson dismisses the Cartesian subject-object divide by centering the relationship between social networking technologies and humans, and thus focuses on the mediating effects of these technologies rather than relying solely on human intentions and control. Importantly, Nelson does not use this move, of decentering human intentions and agency, to remove moral responsibility, but instead works carefully throughout the book to outline the legal and moral implications of her argument (see pp. 41, 44, 45, 49, and 187). Second, I found her approach to be particularly useful in capturing the experience of the echo chamber that is such an infamous aspect of using social networking technologies. She describes the process of people finding themselves in echo chambers as becoming separated onto “moral islands that degenerate into a multiplicity of narratives” (p. 182), which we are then content to stay within. She explains that one of the potential consequences of these echo chambers is radicalization (p. 159). Finally, and drawing on the first two contributions I highlighted, Nelson explicitly challenges throughout the book the Enlightenment idea that humans can control or direct the moral influence of technology to good or desirable ends (see pp. 28–29). Her insistence that “unintended consequences are the hobgoblin of good intentions” (p. 204) captures the danger and limitations inherent in the idea that humans have mastery over the impact of the technologies they produce. Recently, this assumption has been put forward again as social media companies like Facebook claim that they can fix content issues on their websites, like fake news and cyberbullying, through the development of better algorithms. While Nelson does not focus extensively on such algorithms, although she briefly mentions curating ones (p. 159) and those used to “nudge” users towards better behaviors (p. 202), her theoretical framework provides a powerful way to understand them. As with other aspects of social networking technologies such algorithms play a mediating role in human experiences online, which have wide-ranging consequences for what, how, and why we make decisions. Importantly, such algorithms regardless of the human intentions involved are also not “neutral” or “objective” (p. 202), which makes their impacts difficult to anticipate and regulate using existing frameworks.

While I found that this book makes a number of strong contributions to the study of social networking technologies, there were two aspects of Nelson’s argument that I found problematic. First, Nelson at times uses examples that seem to conflate social networking technologies with the wider online or digital world. Her methodological approach calls for subtle, phenomenological analyses of the mediating effect of social networking technologies, but she then freely combines examples from social media websites like Twitter with other forms of online communications (like AOL Instant Messenger [p. 122]), online purchasing (pp. 44–45), and so on. This conflation of examples weakens the specificity she argues for in her focus on the moral effects of using social networking technologies (p. 92). Second, and related to the first, I do think that Nelson’s analyses would be stronger if she dealt more with the differences between social networking technologies, and the differences in people accessing and using these technologies. Nelson is very pointed about not wanting to fall back into the traps of universalism from modernism (p. 206), and in wanting to avoid what she sees as the current he said/she said outcome of postmodernism (p. 207). Yet, she assumes throughout that social networking technologies can be taken as a totality, and that humans will be able to find some shared experience of these technologies on which to build shared understandings (p. 208). I would like to have seen some discussion about specifics: What are the differences, and thus moral implications, of experiencing social networking technologies through Weibo rather than Twitter? What role does age, beyond a simplistic digital native/digital immigrant divide, play in how human experiences are mediated by these technologies? Thus, my primary concerns with the argument of this book is that I want more of it, and, in fact, I look forward to reading more of Nelson’s work in the area in the future.

Nelson’s Social Media and Morality: Losing Our Self Control presents a novel argument about social networking technologies, and challenges the reader to reconsider the role these technologies play in the world and what the implications of such challenges are as we try to deal with issues of cyberbullying, trolling, revenge porn, radicalization, and so on. I think that this book is well suited for graduate students and academics rather than undergraduate students or a wider public audience because of the level of the language and the complexity of the arguments. It would be particularly useful to those with an existing background in phenomenology, social media technology, or the regulation of digital and communications technology. Having a background in any of these fields will allow the reader to confront the subtleties of the book, particularly the jargon, in both his or her own area and in the other areas. I also think that Nelson’s approach to decentering human agency without abandoning moral and legal responsibility would be useful to those working in assemblage theory and distributed agency. The book asks us to think seriously about how we are changed through or mediated by our relationship with the digital world, and what that means for our morals.