An intriguing post from FutureBlogger posts the question: is it possible, in the age of social networks and virtual worlds, that the definition of nationhood is undergoing a radical transformation?
“If Facebook were a country,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, “it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.”
In its recent blog entry, FutureBlogger used this quote to demonstrate that “these structures are among the primary drivers of a flattening world, exerting change on existing culture as they permit a new form bonding across distances, generations and (in just a few years) across language barriers.” FB posits in this post that these powerful social networks – including Second Life, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. – are managing to redefine – or at least make us rethink – what it means to be a nation.
“They are, in fact,” FB writes, “a new type of Massive Meta-Nation that transcends borders and increasingly affects law-making, behavioral norms and personal identity (just as international companies have done for many decades).”
The comparison with international companies is most apt. It can be argued that global companies are nation-like enterprises, but mostly on an economic scale, and FB recognizes as such when it writes, “these structures are accelerators for our existing value generating behavior and will become increasingly critical to us over the next decade.”
Towards the end of the post, FB suggests – with a wink, mind you – that Zuckerberg and Rosedale will perhaps one day get a seat at the United Nations. A stretch? As long as SL and its ilk stay out of politics and issues of geopolitical resource allocation, then, no, it’s not likely that social networks will earn seats at the UN headquarters. But as an economic driver, as a place with its own valid cultural religious backbones, these social networks and virtual worlds do indeed look a lot like… nations. But without the national anthem. Dizzy Banjo where are you?
Not sure I agree. All this post-atomic, bytes not bits, stuff was floating around at the time of the dot.com boom. Much of it died with that boom, and the rest fell down on 11 September. Nations are about power and there is very little evidence of social networks commanding any great hard, or even soft, power. The supporters of the two sides in the Gaza conflict at recent SL events seem to have identified somewhat strongly with the chunks of real estate in the first world rather than with each other or their common second world experience.
In ancient times (okay it was about 1996) disintermediation was the rah rah word of the day. Organisations like corporations and governance were about to disappear in favour of peer-to-peer networks. There’s really not a lot of evidence of that happening, of users identifying with a VW rather than their nationality, or of any VW developing the basics of a common culture or political feeling.
Sadly I hit the button too quickly. Mention of social networks will undoubtedly lead someone to mention al-Qa’ida.
ibn Khladun, and for that matter several Christian historians, were describing social networks rebelling against the government in the thirteenth century. Christianity and Islam seem more prone than most religions to generating chiliastic networks that want to change the order of the world by armed uprising. al-Qa’ida is a very old, not a new phenomenon. Some exact analogies off the top of my head would the Anabptist group that seized control of Munster briefly, the long campaign by the Assassins who were eventually suppressed by the the superpower of their day, the Mongols, or the Almoravid and Almohad movements which briefly dominated the Maghreb and Muslim Spain.
Each of these medieval social networks was directed at acquiring actual real estate as is their contemporary successor. The instrument may have changed but the song remains the same.
When Philip has the power to draft me into the 101st Flying Neko Brigade and send me to Darfur to wag my tail and gesture spam the enemy, I will take this kind of speculation more seriously. I understand there is a great opportunity here to wax hyperbolic about our brave new worlds but it’s all just pixie dust until you can “put boots on the ground”, as it were.
I have more and more encountered the word, “atomic”, to describe the meat that types these words. It is a strange theory of reality to me. If we are nothing but atoms on one side of the glass, and nothing but electrons on the other then we would be wholly quantum phenomenon and, therefore, I should theoretically be able to teleport myself to work every day. I can’t so I think there is an aspect of the phenomenon of “we” that is overlooked by this model; in short, the gurgling bag of blood and bones that is born, pays taxes, then dies.
I am sorry Dusan but the barest notion of a “Nation of Facebook” makes my skin crawl, I should say, makes my atoms, um, makes my atoms… See, atoms just don’t do all those things that make being made up of atoms so much scary fun.
Actually, the atomic world versus some other particle world language shows one of the serious problems with much of this post-modern post-atomicism. Despite the heavily sciency sounding language there’s often very little connexion between the words that get used and the actual meaning of those words.
Scienciness bears about as much relation to science as truthiness does to truth.
“Scienciness bears about as much relation to science as truthiness does to truth.”
Hehe. Thanks for the clarification, Alberik. I am one of those pre-post-modernists for whom semiotics begins and ends with the OED.
Icha.
I’d comment more, Icha, but I’m booked to speak at this fabulous seminar, planned months ago, on the Post-Atomic Economy where we will discuss how the the creation of financial derivatives has set us all free from the boring, prosaic and pre-post-atomic need to ever make any actual stuff ever again. Oh wait.