Tag Social Media

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On Digital Nation-States

Oct 26, ’09 11:09 PM

It strikes me that, more and more, our digital lives are mirroring our real lives in ever more peculiar ways. From reflecting our everyday behaviors to forming new ones, the circles between “digital” and “real” are less a thoroughly overlapping Venn diagram and more a shared area. Which I hope for all of you is as fascinating as it is for me.

The nice thing is that it’s allowing more traditional fields of study to be assimilated into and affected by the things that happen online.

For me, one of the most interesting new overlaps is the one between international relations and digital social networks. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple years now, and I’ve been searching for a list of the major empires & superpowers through history. I finally found a list, and today whipped up the graphic at the top of the post. It’s by no means comprehensive, but it does serve to illustrate a point: the world tends to have a few major powers, and those powers tend to dominate for a while before they are surpassed by an up-and-coming state with greater resources and greater geographic focus.

Which seems pretty similar to how digital networks tend to come and go.

Which leads me to my conclusion:

Digital social networks are the new nation-states. Yeah, I said it. They share more with real nation-states than is immediately apparent. They have laws: the laws of each social network-state are those imposed by its creators or built by its population from terms and conditions, to user experience, to what things one user can see and that another cannot. Take, for example, the litany of Facebook T&C changes over the years, some of which caused uprisings among its population. Their developers’ decisions govern our experiences both with the site and with the rest of the people within the system. And while Facebook and Myspace and others are not sovereign in the way all true nation states are, it is conceivable that someday, there will be digital nationality to go along with or be codefined by “real” nationality.

There are value exchanges among people and people and between people and companies within this digital nation-state, laws can be broken and there are shared identities among the constituents of the state that can be defined against those of other, competing states. To wit, a significant body of work suggests that there are real differences between Myspace people and Facebook people. That these distinctions tend to fall along lines of economic class is no matter; it nevertheless suggests that despite the rise of Facebook, some people see their identities as being more correctly in line with one digital nation or the other.

So, what then? I suggest 5 key changes:

  1. That we start thinking of digital social networks as a potential working model for the society of the future.
  2. That instead of moving from one major network to another, we work to better a chosen digital nation state for the good of all its inhabitants.
  3. That Facebook and others work to elect a governing party of super-users that can help shape its future.
  4. That we recognize that each digital nation state should be unique, and that each has a value that may be unrelated to its size; we recognize the validity of the United States and that of the Principality of Liechtenstein.
  5. That access to these digital states be regarded as a right, rather than a privilege.

I’ll keep pushing this if you will.

Comments (1)

Annoyance ~ Frequency

Aug 5, ’09 1:53 PM

picture-14

It’s a directly proportional relationship. Let’s all not talk about the same things at once, shall we?

Comments (7)

Countering my own point

Dec 17, ’08 9:10 AM

Colonialism Marketing
I wrote this while in the bath yesterday after reading a passage in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Loomba, 1998). I think there is more to the following thoughts, but this is what I’ve come up with so far. These are some of the things I thought about that got me to start writing:

  1. Why social media is like colonialism
  2. Why you should get yourself a goddamn case study
  3. Why is all of this based on our lightly researched guesstimations about people
  4. Jesus how could one agency make this work several times in a row

When I was going to college, I studied international relations. I studied nation-building, history, psychology, sociology and a host of other -ologies in the course of a multidisciplinary line of learning called “Diplomacy and World Affairs”.

Sounds interesting, right?

And completely unrelated to digital strategy, my current profession.

Well, it’s not that different, really.

I have been re-reading my texts from college over the past few months and a few themes have emerged.

Nation-building is and has always been incredibly F-ing difficult.
It’s just too hard for an outsider to come in and understand the ins-and-outs of a culture or civil society. When I was particularly disenchanted during senior year, I wrote my thesis about why we shouldn’t even try. It was a treatise in isolationism based on the idea that if you keep f*cking something up, you’re probably just bad at whatever it is you’re trying to do, and you should probably stop. (Here I’m referring to nation-building exacted by an outside force, not, for example, Singapore’s successful, independent melding of several different cultures after World War 2.)

Colonialism screwed things up for a whole bunch of people.
If you wanted to, you could attribute almost all the problems we face today–terrorism, etc.–to the colonial enterprise. What’s colonialism? Well, Ania Loomba would say it’s “the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods.” I’ll go with her on this one because she’s smart. I do not want to get into the results of colonialism here, but generally they were not great.

Us trying to market to people with social media seems a LOT like Colonialism
Most efforts to market things socially (whether they be the idea of a nation or the idea of a brand) involve a hegemonic force (the marketer) trying to commandeer the resources of a small society (on- or off-line, these are consumers). This sounds a lot like colonialism to me. We try, from our ivory tower, to figure out what “consumers” will like, or at least tolerate, and then we try to blast our messages out to them in the hopes they will be converted to our belief system. Sounds a lot like the efforts to convert African nations to Christian religions to me. Certainly not as problematic, but it illustrates a point.

Most efforts, no matter how well researched, fail.
Research does not mean understanding. The IMF and World Bank, in their incredibly well-researched efforts to help Lesotho, managed to flood the only useful land in a country of herders to produce a dam that would create electricity that would help industrialize the nation. It didn’t really work, at least the last time I checked. Despite our best efforts to do this right, we manage to fail miserably most of the time. And I don’t even think (as an industry) we have anywhere close to the data/research capabilities of an IMF or a World Bank.

We research, we plan, we create tactics and sometimes we even execute them flawlessly. So why do I think we fail most of the time? For one, it’s damn near impossible to find someone with a really good case study. Sure, there are some: Obama; Nike+; Zappos; Comcast Cares. (The first one is easy, but it’s based on a cause. And that last one is spurious. Ask anyone outside the community of web nerds if Comcast cares. Seriously.) Instead of those, show me a case study where social media worked, where an interactive application resulted in incremental profit, as Richard says. Seems to me it must be either (a) really hard to prove effectiveness or (b) that the people talking about “sharing” really aren’t that keen on the idea.

So we keep rehashing the same cases in every blog post, and keep making the same inane “predictions” about where social media is going in 2009.

Here’s a thought: people are going to keep talking to each other online. Good for you, guru. Here’s my prediction: by and large we’re still going to be bad at figuring out how to to talk to people.

It’s just like nation-building. Because it’s difficult and no-one knows how to do it. Things change drastically once you get troops on the ground, once your strategies start mixing with the realities of the network. It’s far easier to create a campaign with distinct, researched message points and beat people into submission. I feel like at a certain point, we should just admit that we shouldn’t be playing in people’s personal spaces, and we should stick to what we do best.

It worked for England. It worked for Portugal. Heck, it’s even worked pretty well for us.

Let’s keep it up?

Comments (5)