Tag Archives: ethnic/civic nationalism

facebook as a nation?

Facebook as a nation
The personal computer appeared to have limited utility until the mid1980s. Social networking sites today may also appear to have limited value as simply reinforcing pre-existing human behaviour online. In the medium to long term, however, the utility of social networking sites could, for example, contribute to eroding the linguistic barriers to human development.

It may seem like political science fiction but imagine a Mandarin speaker reading a facebook message perfectly translated from an English friend into his/her language. It’s dual role being the protection of cultural communities while helping those communities amicably communicate with non-members. If national newspapers could be instantly translated from language to language, it would be far easier to understand divergent cultural values within the EU, for example.

There as several reasons why social networks may never gain the jurisdictional authority of states, but facebook could facilitate a stateless polity allowing the human species to move forward thanks to a foundation based on actually understanding each other. It may be far off but it is preferable to the current situation of compartmentalized interaction.