Social Nation Building, Part 2

Last summer, I blogged about the fact that both Twitter and Facebook had achieved membership numbers that were on a par with many of the larger nations on the planet. I wondered what those virtual nations were good for, aside from playing games and stalking ex’s.  Over the last few weeks, we seem to have discovered at least one of the answers to that question: virtual nations seem to be really good at overthrowing real nations.

We’ve known for a long time that the true value of social networks lies in their number of connections and the quality of their exchanges: the greater number of connections and the higher the quality of exchanges, the more powerful the network (which is one of the biggest reasons why social networking “pilot projects” usually fail—too few connections and too little value exchanges).  This power gets harnessed in lots of commercial ways by sites like Amazon.com (through recommendations) and eBay (through ratings) and Facebook (by targeted advertising).  But it now seems obvious that the ability of social networks to connect ordinary members of a society to one another and to enable political exchanges between them has become a big enabler (if not the biggest) of actual, real-world social change. 

It is a political tsunami unlike any before. Starting with Tunisia in and then Egypt, regime change now seems inevitable in Libya (as of this writing) and perhaps a few additional countries in North Africa and the Middle East.  This defiance and ultimate overthrow of some long-time autocratic rulers has happened with incredible speed (it is mind-boggling to realize this has all happened within the last 60 days). 

And the role that both Twitter and Facebook have played in these popular uprisings seems to be substantial.  They certainly didn’t cause the unrest, but they enabled the unrest that was already there to explode.  In a sense, these giant, pervasive social networks acted as catalysts to speed social reactions that might otherwise have taken months or years to reach fruition, if they reached it at all. Amazing.

This “social network as political catalyst” is certainly a remarkable effect, and one can only guess what will happen as these and other networks like them continue to grow.  We have already seen governments try to defuse these social networks in different ways.  From Egypt, we learned that turning off the cell phone networks and blocking the internet really didn’t seem to have much effect on the ultimate outcome.  In a completely different kind of approach, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has offered $36 billion worth of “gifts” to Saudi citizens in the form of new jobless benefits, education and housing subsidies.  While certainly a more positive tactic to defusing social unrest, it remains to be seen whether it will be effective in the long run (or not so long, given the velocity with which events in other countries have unfolded).

Even in the United States, a breaking story this week involved an apparent solicitation from the Air Force to create software that would allow a person to create numerous artificial personas in a social networking site, in an attempt to influence its exchanges (but that’s a story for another blog entry).

It seems that real nations have awakened to the potential power of these virtual nations. And I would have to believe that, for the most part, they don’t like what they see.