Abstract
Facebook may be considered a megaengineering project because while the service has more than 200 million users worldwide, it is centrally designed and maintained by a relatively small number of engineers. Facebook’s engineers design the infrastructure and write software code to create virtual spaces that encourage the formation of communities that exist simultaneously online and in material spaces. These socially engineered communities also constitute audiences that can be sold to marketers. By providing spaces for community formation Facebook potentially plays a significant role in transforming the face of the Earth. For example it may stimulate increased energy use and travel. It also transformed elections in the United States and is used by nationalist political movements. While Facebook’s use of few-to-many engineering resembles traditional megaengineering projects, it differs in the degree to which users both participate in and resist the engineering of the service in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways.
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Longan, M., Purcell, D. (2011). Engineering Community and Place: Facebook as Megaengineering. In: Brunn, S. (eds) Engineering Earth. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_6
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