Project Title
Engineering the Social World? An Intellectual History of Facebook/Meta, 2004-2021
Research Topic
Asher received ESRC funding to conduct an intellectual history of Facebook/Meta from 2004 to 2021. Drawing on platform studies and historical theory, his research analyses the language with which actors in and around the company came to depict the world, its transformations, and the social infrastructure they were building. His thesis unfolds across three interconnected dimensions: Facebook/Meta’s conception of space, its articulations of historical time, and its epistemological and ontological positionings.
Asher’s research not only charts the intellectual development over these two decades but seeks to historicize Facebook’s ‘thinking’, by examining these ideas within the historical and geographical contexts from which they emerged. Asher’s research then examines the first two decades of the 21st century alongside broader histories of coloniality, utopianism, cybernetics, and contestations over the World Wide Web.
Biography
Asher received an MA in Philosophy & Politics at the University of Edinburgh, where he focused on the history of social and political thought. He received an MSc in Theory and History of International Relations from 番茄社区 in 2019, for which he was awarded the Medlicott Prize for his research.
Before his PhD, Asher worked as a journalist for several years. In 2017, he received the Peter Kirk Scholarship to research and write on refugee integration in Sweden and Germany. He also covered Science and Technology for the Conversation UK. Between 2019-2021, he reported on British, Irish and Scandinavian politics for the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun.
Supervisors: Professor Emerita Robin Mansell and Professor Nick Couldry