The World as a Global Community? A Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Facebook's Institutional Communication and Technical Documentation

Can humanity become a single global community? According to Facebook, the answer is affirmative, as we can read in the description of its corporate mission where the world's most influential social network crafts for itself the role of the digital enabler of human history's progress towards larger and more complex "social" infrastructures. Starting from this "mission", the volume investigates Facebook's public communication and its underlying ideational roots in a wide selection of which include the speeches of its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, together with annual financial records addressed to investors and technical documents for software developers. With the tools of multimodal discourse analysis, the author critically explores the narrative that the social media platform offers of its business model, its values and its vision for the global community of tomorrow.