Things Fall Apart: How Social Media Leads to a Less Stable World
While social media provides myriad benefits, the advances in connectivity and wealth may come at the expense of the state and the worlds stability, writes Curtis Hougland, CEO of Attentionusa.com, a global social marketing agency.
James Foley. David Haines. Steven Sotloff. The list of people beheaded by followers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) keeps growing. The filming of these acts on video and distribution via social media platforms such as Twitter represent a geopolitical trend in which social media has become the new frontline for proxy wars across the globe. While social media does indeed advance connectivity and wealth among people, its proliferation at the same time results in a markedly less stable world.
That social media benefits mankind is irrefutable. I have been an evangelist for the power of new media for 20 years. However, technology in the form of globalized communication, transportation and supply chains conspires to make todays world more complex. Events in any corner of the world now impact the rest of the globe quickly and sharply. Nations are being pulled apart along sectarian seams in Iraq, tribal divisions in Afghanistan, national interests in Ukraine and territorial fences in Gaza. These conflicts portend a quickening of global unrest, confirmed by Foreign Policy magazines map of civil protest. The ISIS videos are simply the exposed wire. I believe that over the next century, even great nations will Balkanize break into smaller nations. One of the principal drivers of this Balkanization is social mediaTwitter.
Social media is a behavior, an expression of the innate human need to socialize and share experiences. Social media is not simply a set of technology channels and networks. Both the public and private sectors have underestimated the human imperative to behave socially. The evidence is now clear with more than 52%of the population living in cities and approximately 2 billion people active in social media globally. Some 96% of content emanates from individuals, not brands, media or governments a volume that far exceeds participation in democratic elections.
Social media is not egalitarian, though. Despite the exponential growth of user-generated content, people prefer to congregate online around like-minded individuals. Rather than seek out new beliefs, people choose to reinforce their existing political opinions through their actions online. This is illustrated in Pew Internets 2014 study, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks from Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters. Individuals self-organize by affinity, and within affinity, by sensibility and personality. The ecosystem of social media is predicated on delivering more of what the user already likes. This, precisely, is the function of a Follow or Like. In this way, media coagulates rather than fragments online.
Shock and Recruit
Worryingly, the more extreme the personality and sensibility of the author in relation to the affinity, the more popular he or she is on social media. Affinities such as friendship, religion, political belief and geography devolve into narrower and narrower versions of themselves. The true purpose of the ISIS videos is not to shock Westerners outraged by the savagery; their purpose is to recruit like-minded zealots to the cause and establish their brand promise under a black flag.
The ecosystem of social media is predicated on delivering more of what the user already likes. This, precisely, is the function of a Follow or Like. In this way, social media coagulates rather than fragments online.
Extra-national communities destabilize the state by providing avenues for establishing loyalty that are stronger than those provided by the state. This extra-nation of social media smacks of the fall of Roman Empire, in which affinity toward Christianity superseded loyalty to the Empire. In the Balkans, ethnicity and religion became more important than nationhood. Todays nations are hamstrung by recently drawn political boundaries and gerrymandering driven by colonization and self-interests.
Social media is Federalism 2.0. Formal nationhood as the basis for a social contract with its citizens dates only to the 17thcentury. It is a relatively new phenomenon. As Pankaj Mishra points out in Bloomberg View, Few people in 1900 expected centuries-old empires Qing, Hapsburg, Ottoman to collapse by 1918. The belief in the centralized nation as the default political organization is grossly misplaced. And we are seeing the de-evolution of nationhood before our eyes in our daily newsfeeds.
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Things Fall Apart: How Social Media Leads to a Less Stable World