Measuring Soft Power in Cyberspace

Is China the Internet’s New Super Power?

China’s significant economic, technological, and military growth in the 21st century has presented the United States with its first peer competitor since the end of the Cold War. Significant analysis has gone into comparing America and China in those three categories. What is less understood is how the two countries compare in soft power resources. Soft power competition between America and China is less understood for two reasons: this category of power is historically under examined, and technological change means soft power measurement criteria are constantly evolving. Soft power may be a key part of the geopolitical competition between China and America, but insufficient methodology exists to determine how the countries compare and whether an advantage may be gained through a soft power strategy.

Soft power is a term, coined by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in the late 1980s, to distinguish a state's available strategies and tactics of persuasion from those of coercion. Soft power, in its most basic sense, is the ability to get other states to want what you want through attraction and affinity. Often relegated, in American geo-strategic discourse, to the domain of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, soft power is much more than advertising savvy or pop culture adoption. In his 2004 book on the subject, Nye articulates 3 different sources of soft power:

• “its culture (in places where it is attractive to others);

• “its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad);

• “its foreign policies (when they are legitimate and seen as having moral authority)”

Nye saw that the information age would increase the importance of soft power. He wrote that, "The information age is creating virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders," which would enable these groups to develop soft power in ways that would rival nation states. Foremost in Nye's focus was transnational terror groups, and the intervening decades have shown his prediction to be true. As groups built soft power in the new realm of cyberspace, individuals learned to feel affinity towards the groups sharing information online that resonated with them. In an eerie echo of the "alternative facts" thinking of current American politics, Nye added, "The ability to share information — and to be believed — becomes an important source of attraction and power." In short, effective use of cyberspace becomes a 4th source of soft power. In recent years, Jonathan McClory has defined a methodology for evaluating soft power first as part of the Institute for Government and most recently at the strategic communications firm Portland. McClory's methodology examines both objective and subjective criteria which will be explored in depth later in this analysis, but it has built on Nye’s original ideas to the point that is does include a dedicated ‘Digital’ section that helps determine a country's soft power score.

In his writings, Nye used books, television shows, movies and other media products and their worldwide audience as a measure of a country’s attractiveness. It’s clear that the spread of digital communications technology has drastically changed the media landscape around the world, and therefor must have had an impact on soft power. Yet, the foremost thinkers on the topic seem to barely wade past the shallow end of how it is cultivated and leveraged in cyberspace. This analysis seeks to articulate an enhanced understanding of how nations are engendering affinity with foreign audiences through their contributions to cyberspace's hardware, software, and the content that makes up user discourse online.

China's Growing Digital Soft Power

The production, means of distribution, and content of global culture has been more dominated by American books, movies, brands, and science than by any other country since Nye began quantifying soft power 40 years ago. In more recent decades, that trend has continued in cyberspace based on the central role that American firms like Google, Apple, and Facebook have played in the digital world. However, the United States is no longer the clear leader in cyberspace. As China contributes more and more hardware, software, and content to cyberspace, Beijing's stores of digital soft power grow. 

Skeptics may point to the shear size of the Chinese population, arguing that as more Chinese gain access to the internet the country’s prominence in cyberspace will naturally grow. For example, We Are Social reports that as of January 2021 65.2% of China's 1.4 billion people use the internet, giving them an estimated user population of over 900 million people. Compared to the 90% of Americans that use the internet, equivalent to 295 million users, it makes sense that Chinese share of voice is greater. But cyberspace is not one single place totally navigable to every user. Much like the physical world, there are realms of cyberspace that Americans frequent and Chinese don't, and vis versa. Chinese users have a hard time getting on American apps like Facebook, Youtube, or Google. Meanwhile, few Americans are active on Chinese apps like QQ, WeChat, or Sina Weibo. This bifurcation of cyberspace should be our first cue to look for a Chinese strategy towards the internet and its role in geopolitical competition. And one doesn't need to look too far to find successive Chinese administrations highlighting digital soft power as a strategic focus.

In 2007, then-president Hu Jintao connected the importance of China's international image to it's growth for the first time. He cited numerous realms where China's image should be manicured and spread, including cyberspace: "We will strengthen efforts to develop and manage internet culture and foster a good cyber environment." Seven years later, Xi Jinping was even more specific, describing his aspirations for a cyber strategy that would, "...increase China's soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China's message to the world." One outcome of this evolving policy has been the Digital Silk Road, the telecommunications arm of the Belt and Road Initiative. It is evident that using cyberspace as both a tool to grow, and an area to exert, soft power is a strategic focus for Beijing. But given the nebulous quality of soft power and the complexity of cyberspace, how can these efforts be quantified to determine whether China has been successful?

How Soft Power is Measured

Soft power is typically a term evoked when discussing strategy and infrequently quantified or specified. As discussed above, McClory has done the most to produce a methodical, transparent measurement of soft power rankings. His work, which has made him “a globally recognized expert on soft power,” leads to the annual production of the Soft Power 30 that is released by the London-based political consultancy and public relations agency, Portland.

The Soft Power 30 judges soft power based on objective criteria (divided into Enterprise, Culture, Digital, Government, Engagement, and Education) and subjective criteria gathered through international polling in G20 countries which covers an array of topics like favorability, perceptions of a country's contributions to global culture, and perceptions of a country's technology products, to name a few. Of concern in this analysis is the Digital category of Portland’s objective criteria and the cyber-related polling questions.

In their Digital category of Objective Data, Portland weights a country’s Digital score as 13.1% of its total score for the objective Data section. This makes it the 5th out of their 6 categories in this section, with Government counting the most (20.8%) and Culture counting the least (12.5%) towards a nation's total score. The criteria of the Digital Category are:

• Facebook followers for heads of state or government (outside of country)

• Facebook engagement score for heads of state or government (outside of country)

• Facebook followers for ministry of foreign affairs (outside of country)

• Facebook engagement score for ministry of foreign affairs (outside of country)

• Number of internet users per 100 inhabitants

• Secure internet servers per 1 million people

• Internet bandwidth

• Government Online Services Index

• E-participation Index

• Fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people

However, not all of these metrics truly show a country’s influence in cyberspace. For example, while digital connectivity and telecommunication infrastructure are important measurements, they don't provide clear insight when it comes to how a country is perceived by foreign populations in cyberspace or the affinity netizens show toward a nation. Thus, we're left with 4 Facebook metrics to gauge how much digital soft power a nation has amongst the rest of the world. The world of advertising and marketing has left Facebook followers behind as a key performance indicator, and its time public diplomacy did as well. The Facebook engagement scores of heads of state and ministries of foreign affairs are important metrics, but they are hardly sufficient to account for global soft power in cyberspace. Beyond the fact that Facebook is just one app in a very competitive neighborhood, is the average person's opinion of Japan really effected by what Shinzo Abe posted to Facebook in 2019? Would the average person know that, when stumbling across the Facebook page for Auswärtiges Amt, that it was the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Obviously, these metrics don't tell the whole story when it comes to a nation's digital soft power.

Improvements to Digital Soft Power Measurement 

As shown, existing soft power measurement relies on traditional examples of how a person can be influenced by another country. Not so much outdated as increasingly incomplete, the set of metrics used to gauge a country’s soft power stores need to be expanded to include the myriad ways that individuals are exposed to other countries in cyberspace. And while cyberspace is an increasingly central part of the daily life of many people around the world, its prominence can be hard to compare to or separate from the rest of our daily life. 

One way to do this, however, is to examine what portion of the time that the average person is awake during the day is spent on the internet. Based on OECD Time Use data detailing how much time people in countries around the world spend asleep, along with data showing how much time people spend on the internet by country, it can be determined that the average person spends 41.07% of their waking time on the internet. Table A shows the proportion of waking time spent online for a sample of countries.

As more people gain access to the internet, a population that has grown by 7.37% yearly between 2016 and 2020, ever more time will be spent in cyberspace. The analysis in the next section attempts to provide the new ways to quantify a country’s soft power at the 3 levels of cyberspace (hardware, software, and content) to more accurately determine a country’s ability to influence and attract foreign audiences. This analysis will focus on China’s activities in these 3 levels of cyberspace, compared to the United States for reference, though it could be conducted for any country at all, or some, of the levels of cyberspace in which they participate. 

First, we’ll look at hardware to see how much of the infrastructure makes the internet function, and provides the invisible connectivity that many people depend on for social and professional activities, depends on Chinese technology, Chinese firms, and Chinese funding. The focus of this section is the Digital Silk Road (DSR), a sub-project of the Belt and Road Initiative. The DSR increasingly represents the disparate efforts of Beijing and various Chinese firms to expand their digital involvement beyond China’s borders. Using statements from company leaders, it is possible to get a rough idea of the proportion of individuals around the world who, at least in part, have China to thank when they connect to the internet.

Then, the analysis turns towards software. The experiences that individuals have online are often novel, and the utility that a new application or software has in one’s life (albeit to save time, provide entertainment, or create opportunity) is often significant. When these applications and software gain a place in people’s daily routine or tool set they, as a cultural product, can exert an influence over users. This analysis focuses on major Chinese apps WeChat and TikTok and compares the user bases of these apps, and the time users spend on them, to their American counterparts. 

Finally, the analysis dives into the firehouse of content that makes up the discourse on the internet to begin to quantify China’s share of voice online. While attempting to exactly quantify share of voice on the internet in real time is beyond the scope of this analysis, the goal of this section of the report is to show how available metrics, like hashtag usage and follower counts, can be used more effectively than in the measurement models described above. Additionally, using Google Trends, a comparison of state-offered versus non-state offered narratives was made for two key Chinese issues: Taiwan sovereignty and treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This comparison shows that not only can a country’s share of voice online be quantified by volume, but the effectiveness of the country’s influence can also be measured. As will be shown, while Beijing may push the concept of Taiwan as a breakaway province, the volume of Chinese content online has not lead to the government’s desired narrative being adopted and thus shows the limited success of soft power tactics in the example of Taiwan. Just as travel to and consumer goods from other countries expose individuals and their networks of family and friends to foreign countries, so do the stories, videos, and images they are exposed to online. Share of voice in cyberspace, then, obviously plays a role in how often people are exposed to a country. With so many different metrics available, this category at once presents the most potential and the most difficulty for measuring soft power in cyberspace.

Throughout the analysis section, public polling data from Pew Research, which maintains a Global Indicators database that has been crucial for this analysis, is used to show how the growth in China’s presence at each level of cyberspace may, or may not, align with increased global favorability towards China around the world.

Analyzing the 3 Layers of Cyberspace

Layer I: Hardware

This analysis will look first at hardware, the technical infrastructure and equipment that makes up cyberspace. Chinese involvement in this portion of cyberspace can be examined through the activities and footprints of its major telecommunication companies, ZTE and, in particular, Huawei. 

David Greene, of the Carnegie Endowment, details how disparate efforts by Beijing and Chinese companies have coalesced since the early 2000’s into the Digital Silk Road (DSR), initially a branding effort by Beijing but now an increasingly important aspect of the broader Belt and Road Initiative. As part of this policy, “Beijing will invest resources to help its domestic tech giants pursue commercial business opportunities and be involved at all levels of the digital infrastructure built along the DSR: fiber-optic and mobile equipment infrastructure, telecommunications carrier services, and over-the-top providers of applications services.” Since the formal announcement of the DSR in 2015, Chinese companies have both self-aligned their efforts with Beijing’s policies and had previously established international expansion projects be brought under the auspices of the DSR. Many critics of the DSR worry that, “China will use the DSR to enable recipient countries to adapt its model of technology-enabled authoritarianism,” including surveillance, censorship, and espionage. What is relevant to this analysis is, not so much the level of state-controlled coordination or worrisome tactics that the DSR enables, but whether the spread of Chinese technology around the world will impact the soft power China cultivates with customer countries.

One of the factors that has driven favorability of the United States around the world is respect and admiration for American innovations in technology and science. In both 2007 and 2012, Pew found that America’s scientific and technological advancements were more admired around the world than American media, ideas about democracy, business practices, or ideas and customs. With Chinese apps becoming more advanced and more adopted around the world, it follows that China may begin to attract some of the soft power in this category that has, in recent decades, been the United States’ main store of international admiration. 

Source: Pew

There are approximately 50 countries potentially taking part in DSR projects. According to Deloitte, as of 2018, China had spent $79 billion of the forecasted $200 billion that the DSR will include. And the impact of the DSR goes far beyond a stronger signal for your mobile device and includes “…telecommunications networks, artificial intelligence capabilities, cloud computing, e-commerce and mobile payment systems, surveillance technology, smart cities, and other high-tech areas.” Whether or not those efforts are stemming from strategic oversight in Beijing, whether or not they enable customer countries to surveil their citizens, whether or not potential backdoors in the technology enable China to exploit foreign data, the idea that people of the DSR countries will have access to the most advanced technology in their daily lives through Chinese innovation, aid, and instruction, will cultivate soft power. The goal of the policy, according to Greene, is to have China and Chinese firms “…contribute more to the global [cyber] standards-setting process, which would help advance Beijing’s vision of a more China-influenced technology stack."

On its website, Huawei states that, “more than 3 billion of the world’s population uses Huawei products and services to make calls, send text messages, or surf the internet.” As of mid-2019, the company’s CEO, Ryan Ding, stated that, “Huawei equipment is now behind two-thirds of the commercially launched 5G networks outside China.” It is important to reiterate that, while some assert that Huawei and ZTE present national security threats to the United States, that is not the issue at hand in this analysis. Instead, this report seeks to make the case that China’s growing involvement and investment in the technological advancement of countries around the world, and the subsequent soft power gains it will create, is not being properly interrogated, regardless of what motives Beijing may or may not have.

For example, consider how the African Union, in 2018, responded to the type of event that American politicians typically use for political leverage against China: the revelation of a data breach. In 2018, it was reported that the IT systems at African Union’s headquarters had been “…compromised, leading to a leak of information to China over a five-year period.” The IT equipment had been supplied by Huawei, and the company had also set up the AU’s servers and trained local staff. While none of the behavior points explicitly towards espionage, the AU’s response to the event was indicative of the trusting relationship that it has built with China. The two parties denied any allegations of spying and continue to work together on various technological advancements.

Layer II: Software

Chinese software is also becoming a more prominent part of the average social media user’s daily life. While the apps owned by American companies like Facebook (such as Facebook, Instagram, FB Messenger, and WhatsApp) and Google (YouTube) still have many of the largest user bases in the world, Chinese apps are joining their ranks. Based on the social media apps analyzed as part of the Digital 2021 Global Overview Report, an annual collaboration between Hootsuite, a social media company, and the advertising agency We Are Social, TikTok had grown the 3rd largest user base as of 2020. (In this analysis, TikTok’s global audience has been combined with the domestic audience on the app’s Chinese version, Douyin.)

The story is similar when looking at messaging apps, where Tencent-owned app WeChat (colloquially known as Weixin in China) has the third largest user base behind Facebook’s two messenger apps, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. 

WeChat, despite being the world’s third-most used messaging app, hasn’t seen much adoption outside China, where 75.1% of internet users use the app. Hong Kong (32.3%) and Taiwan (12.3%) have relatively high penetrations amongst their populations of internet users, while only other Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have penetration rates higher than 4%.

Tiktok’s growth was a major news story throughout 2020, from its expansion in Southeast Asia to its rapid adoption in the United States. As the charts below show, the numbers support the widespread media attention. In the United States, TikTok’s user base increased by 150% between the end of 2019 and August 2020. And while the United States’ domestic user growth of TikTok over the course of 2020 was dramatic (85.3%) it was hardly alone in experiencing the rapid adoption of the Chinese app as several countries saw their TikTok user base more than double: Italy, Russia, and Norway. 

Globally, China has the largest TikTok user base, with 57.6% of China’s 424.8 million internet users using the app. Southeast Asian countries also have high penetration, but so do Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Kenya. And despite the rapid adoption of TikTok in the United States, only 17.9% of American internet users are on currently the app, meaning it has plenty of room for expansion. 

While TikTok’s rise and widespread usage are important measures of how foreign users are experiencing Chinese technology, an aspect of the narrative around TikTok is key to understanding it’s potential as a soft power generator. The artificial intelligence (AI) that powers TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm has been described as “groundbreaking,” and has been characterized by Bloomberg thus: “Within a day, the app can get to know you so well it feels like it’s reading your mind.” While Facebook’s algorithm, for example, relies heavily on what your friends have engaged with to recommend content and posts that you may like, TikTok has a new approach. It records data on what users actually click on, “right down to the type of music, faces, and voices in videos,” and recommends videos based on these criteria that users may not even know they are interested in yet. Because of its innovative use of AI, TkiTok has a claim as the most advanced social media network available. Again, the idea that Chinese technology is superseding that of its American counterparts is part of the story and justifies further examination of just how much of the growth and evolution of cyberspace future populations around the world will attribute to China compare to the United States.

Layer III: Share of Voice

The third level of cyberspace in which to measure influence is the content that populates the newsfeeds that dominate most users’ online experiences. Share of voice is an advertising metric that tracks the portion of the overall conversation in a certain arena that focuses on a given topic, typically a brand. The content level of cyberspace is a massive an amorphous region that would be difficult to ever fully measure, but by examining a few initial metrics it becomes clear what to track in order to approach an understanding of how a country’s influence can be measured in online discourse. 

Looking specifically at social media platforms, they are a place for user generated content to be shared and viewed. While some of those users are media outlets and companies, obviously a significant portion of them are private citizens from all over the world who may, or may not, contribute content to the platforms they spend time on. Data on the number of posts that users of specific countries publish across various social platforms is not readily available. However, an imperfect measurement of social media activity is the amount of time a user typically spends on social media and the number of social media accounts the average use has.

As the table below shows, Chinese and Americans spend roughly the same amount of time on social media and are typically a few seconds below the worldwide average. When it comes to social media accounts, Americans have consistently had about 7 different social media accounts on average since early in 2019, while Chinese have seen their average number of accounts decrease recently to 7.4, down from a peak of 9.3. While these numbers hint at being able to quantify which nation, and the narratives their citizens knowingly and unknowingly promulgate with their social media content, dominate cyberspace, they can’t provide the whole picture. What they do suggest, though, is that the average citizen in the two countries has very similar social media habits. 

Google Trends provides another way to gauge how influential a country’s narratives are online. As the adage goes, there are always two sides to a story and measuring which side’s terminology is being searched more frequently provides insight into which narrative is influencing the digital discourse more.

For example, the topic of Taiwan’s sovereignty is a contentious one where China pushes one side and Taiwan pushes another. From China’s perspective, Taiwan is a breakaway province referred to, unsurprisingly, as ‘Taiwan Province’. The government in Taipei and the people on the island of Taiwan, on the other hand, see their island as the ‘Republic of China,’ a sovereign nation run by a government in exile. Google Trends provides data on the relative interest over time that each of these search terms have elicited. As the graph below shows, ‘Republic of China’ has been searched much more frequently since 2004, though is trending downward over time. ‘Taiwan Province,’ on the other hand, has elicited very little interest. Two caveats must be pointed out when examining Google Trends data: first, Google is not widely accessible in China and so a major portion of potential searchers are not included in the data, and second, Google data is notoriously obtuse and absolute values of interest are unreliable. Relative differences are what this data shows, and the relative difference in interest between these search terms shows that Beijing’s narrative on Taiwan has little traction when it comes to global search behavior.

Another controversial topic with competing narratives is the situation in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have focused on addressing issues of terrorism in the region while the global community has questioned whether China is committing genocide against the Uyghur minority there. This topic, from a search trend perspective, is more competitive. While the term ‘Uyghur Genocide’ has gained more interest in recent months and briefly late in 2019, in general these narratives have typically generated a similar amount of interest when measured using these overarching search terms. 

The existing soft power index looks at social media follower counts and engagement rate for official Facebook pages, those of the head of state and the foreign ministry. This approach is too narrow, but it does identify a key way to measure the affinity that an international audience has towards a country. By looking at social media engagement metrics that signal affinity from more typical people who aren’t necessarily following the foreign ministry of the country they’ll be visiting next, one can see another perspective on how countries own share of voice online.

The table below shows a set of tourism-related social media signals that can be used to measure the affinity towards a country on social media. Measuring  the number of hashtag instances of country names, tourist attractions, and top tourism cities gives a digital footprint of real-world travel experiences and also shows the reach that digital content from tourism has in cyberspace as it proliferates in the feeds of posters’ networks based on algorithmic recommendations. Finally, measuring the audience size of a nation’s tourism brand, which typically posts content to the internet that is of more interest to the average person than the nation’s foreign ministry or head of state, provides better insight into the affinity a netizen may have towards a specific country.

The bifurcation of social media apps between those used by Americans and those used by Chinese complicates the comparison between the two countries. However, the importance of these data is the same as the other metrics analyzed at the content level of cyberspace: it is possible to get a much more detailed picture of share of voice online, and the soft power stores that it indicates, than current measurement models are using. 

China’s Cyber Prominence Hasn’t Generated Soft Power

Despite China’s growing presence throughout the 3 levels of cyberspace, Beijing has not be able to translate that prominence into soft power. While the current soft power measurement methodology does not adequately quantify the digital influencer a country can exert or the actual affinity that global populations pay a country, the outcome of a successful soft power strategy is the same: being seen favorably in the eyes of the world. While the spread of Huawei technology is connecting more and more people to cyberspace, and Chinese apps compete with their Silicon Valley counterparts, and digital depictions of Chine proliferate on social media news feeds, opinions of China around the world have fallen in recent years.

Pew Research Center maintains a Global Indicators database, where they ask a sampling of countries different geopolitical questions each year. Since 2002, Pew has surveyed a total of 61 different countries and gathered 416 responses to the question, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of China?” The graph below shows how global opinion of China has changed over the period.

As recently as 2015, more than half of the world’s opinion of China was favorable. As of 2020, average favorability was down to 45%. Data from the BBC shows the same pattern of decreasing favorability. And the pattern is consistent when the surveyed nations are grouped by geopolitical affiliations, as the comparisons below show between OECD member versus non-member states and Belt and Road Initiative member versus non-member states.

In its analysis of the 2020 survey data, Pew attributes the recent decreases in favorability towards China to the coronavirus pandemic, as “The rise in unfavorable views comes amid widespread criticism over how China has handled the coronavirus pandemic.” Narrowing the time period in question does sow significant changes in public opinion towards China in many different countries starting during the pandemic, as shown in Chart A in the appendix. However, the graphs above show that his trend in declining Chinese favorability has been occurring since long before the pandemic so while the coronavirus outbreak has obviously created significant issues for Chinese popularity, it does not explain a decades-long trend. Additionally, to see popular opinion of China generally decreasing throughout the 21st century despite the global efforts of the Belt and Road Initiative, which began in 2013, is surprising. 

This analysis has focused on how to better quantify China’s soft power in cyberspace, and it has articulated numerous novel ways to track a country’s influence over international audiences, measure the affinity people around the world have towards a foreign country by establishing the crucial role that cyberspace plays in the lives of people the world over. It has shown that China’s digital soft power is not accurately demonstrated in existing soft power calculations, and pointed to the fact that Beijing’s goodwill online is likely higher than it had previously been given credit for. However, McClory is right to weight the Digital criteria for soft power less than Education, Enterprise, Engagement, and Government. As the data from Pew and the BBC shows, there are bigger geopolitical forces shaping public opinion than a country’s prominence in cyberspace. 

So while China’s influence online, and the importance of cyberspace in soft power generation in general, is only likely to grow, in the near future this blind spot doesn’t seem likely to cause any strategic miscalculations on the part of countries looking to counter China in any of the realms of state competition. China is not the internet’s new super power, though analysts do need a better methodology to track soft power online in order to continue to be sure of that fact.

---

Appendix A

Bibliography

“BRI Update 2019–Recalibration and New Opportunities .” Deloitte, 2019, www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/cn/Documents/ser-soe-br/deloitte-cn-bri-update-2019-recalibration-and-new-opportunities-en-190422.pdf. 

“Chapter 2. Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas.” Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, 24 July 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/2012/06/13/chapter-2-attitudes-toward-american-culture-and-ideas/. 

“China's Digital Aid: The Risks and Rewards.” Council on Foreign Relations, www.cfr.org/china-digital-silk-road/. 

“China's Xi Strikes Conciliatory Note, Broadens Diplomatic Focus.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 30 Nov. 2014, www.reuters.com/article/us-china-southchinasea/chinas-xi-strikes-conciliatory-note-broadens-diplomatic-focus-idUSKCN0JE04J20141130. 

Dishman, Lydia. “Is TikTok a Time Bomb?” Fast Company, Fast Company, 27 Aug. 2019, www.fastcompany.com/90395898/is-tiktok-a-time-bomb. 

“Global Indicators Database.” Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, 23 Mar. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/database/indicator/24. 

Google Trends, Google, 2021, trends.google.com/trends/. 

“How Are Global Views on China Trending?” ChinaPower Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 26 Aug. 2020, chinapower.csis.org/global-views/. 

Hu, Jintao. “Hu Jintao's Report at 17th Party Congress.” 2007, Beijing, 17th National Congress of the Communist Part of China. 

“Huawei Facts.” Huawei, 2021, www.huawei.com/us/facts. 

Kemp, Simon. We Are Social; Hootsuite, 2021, Digital 2021: Global Overview Report. 

Koetsier, John. “Massive TikTok Growth: Up 75% This Year, Now 33X More Users Than Nearest Direct Competitor.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 15 Sept. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/14/massive-tiktok-growth-up-75-this-year-now-33x-more-users-than-nearest-competitor/?sh=2c5c9d494fe4. 

Kurlantzick, Joshua. “China's Digital Silk Road Initiative: A Boon for Developing Countries or a Danger to Freedom?” The Diplomat, 17 Dec. 2020, thediplomat.com/2020/12/chinas-digital-silk-road-initiative-a-boon-for-developing-countries-or-a-danger-to-freedom/. 

Li, Jill. “As China's Vloggers Draw International Fans, Beijing Sees Soft Power Opportunity.” Voice of America, 2020, www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/voa-news-china/chinas-vloggers-draw-international-fans-beijing-sees-soft-power. 

Liao, Rita. “Huawei Says Two-Thirds of 5G Networks Outside China Now Use Its Gear.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 26 June 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/06/25/huawei-wins-5g-contracts/. 

McCabe, David. “F.C.C. Designates Huawei and ZTE as National Security Threats.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/technology/fcc-huawei-zte-national-security.html. 

McClory, Jonathan. Portland; Facebook, 2019, The Soft Power 30, softpower30.com/. 

Nedopil, Christoph. “Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).” Green Belt and Road Initiative Center, 2021, green-bri.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri/. 

Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Public Affairs, 2004. 

Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban, et al. “Time Use.” Our World in Data, 29 Nov. 2020, ourworldindata.org/time-use. 

Sholihyn, Ilyas. “It's 2020, and TikTok's Just Getting Started for Domination in Southeast Asia.” AsiaOne, 5 Jan. 2020, www.asiaone.com/digital/it-2020-and-tiktok-just-getting-started-regional-domination-southeast-asia. 

Silver, Laura, et al. “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries.” Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, 13 Jan. 2021, www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/. 

Triolo, Paul, and Robert Greene. “Will China Control the Global Internet Via Its Digital Silk Road?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2020, carnegieendowment.org/2020/05/08/will-china-control-global-internet-via-its-digital-silk-road-pub-81857. 

Triolo, Paul. “The Digital Silk Road: Expanding China’s Digital Footprint.” Eurasia Group, 8 Apr. 2020, www.eurasiagroup.net/files/upload/digital-silk-road-expanding-china-digital-footprint.pdf. 

The Impact of Cyberspace on Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson, in his 1983 book, Imagined Communities, defined the nation as an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” As opposed to earlier societal structures like kingdoms, empires, and city states, Anderson describes how the idea of the nation developed due to the slow deterioration of three earlier concepts that had been central to previous political structures. These three concepts were: primacy of sacral languages as sources of truth, the spread of extralocal communities, and the shift that occurred in the concept of simultaneity in the modern period. These three historical currents combined to create the political situations and personal mindsets necessary for the concept of the modern nation to develop, and they were driven in large part by the expansion of print capitalism and the ways it changed how people communicated. 

First, Anderson describes in great detail the primacy that sacral languages like Latin, Classical Arabic, and Examination Chinese had among the peoples of those cultures up until the era of print capitalism. These languages, or more precisely the characters themselves that made up these languages, were seen by the illiterate masses as part of, rather than documentation or description of, the sacredness of their beliefs. These characters, and the clergy who could decipher them, provided access to the divine in ways that vernacular languages, like English or French or Spanish which individuals spoke in their homes and their villages, did not. But, Anderson argues, the invisible but logical forces of capitalism predictably elevated these vernacular languages when, combined with the new communication technology of the printing press in the second half of the 16th century, publishers began publishing books in vernacular languages after saturating the much more limited market of Latin readers. Next, the spread of print capitalism exposed people to an extralocal community, or one made up of more than just the people they interacted with a daily basis. 

Third, of crucial importance in understanding how digital communications technology today is impacting community formation is an understanding of the concept of simultaneity and how it changed during the early modern period. Anderson describes that shift thus:

“What has come to take the place of the medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time is…an idea of ‘homogenous, empty time’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincide, and measured by clock and calendar.”

Anderson uses the newspaper to illustrate this new version of simultaneity by inviting the reader to imagine the front page of the New York Times. On it, on any given day, one can expect to see what heads of state around the world are working on, what new legislation is affecting domestic businesses, what is happening in New York City, human rights violations on the other side of the world, and stories of political corruption. While some of these events may align with or impact each other, the only reason they are gathered on the front page of the newspaper is that they are important for understanding what is happening on a given day. Additionally, each morning as millions of people around the country and the world read about these events while they drink their morning coffee, the way the events have been presented in the newspaper will impact people’s concept of what is, in fact, happening today. When initially developed, the experience of reading, for example, a newspaper in Paris which told you what was happening in cities and villages, and to people and businesses, throughout France that you would likely never visit or meet created, as Anderson describes it, the “confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.” 

Until the printed word and capitalism joined forces, in the shape of newspapers as well as novels, the vast majority of people lived local lives made of up of type of communities possible in “primordial villages of face-to-face contact.” Events weren’t catalogued by date or by geography, but in the pre-modern “simultaneity-along-time” framework. Suddenly, one went through life aware of the lives and experiences of far-flung members of a community organized not based on religion or by subject-hood, but by vernacular language. 

Anderson, whose above ideas formed the basis of the Constructivist view of identity formation, would have been fascinated by the forces now at work altering the world’s communications methods. The spread of digital communications technology is altering and intensifying the factors originally outlined in Imagined Communities. The major accelerant is the prevalence of the smartphone, which Pew estimates currently connects 2.5 billion people to the Internet and the communications mediums it hosts. What separates the smartphone from earlier communications mediums like books or newspapers is that the individual now controls the means of publication. While critics may question the strength or authenticity of communities that form digitally, this paper examines three cases that show the tangible, political activity being driven by groups formed in new ways made possible by the maturation of cyberspace. As Anderson wrote, “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” Following that distinction, this paper seeks to examine the new communities imagined in the 21st century.

Section I: Digital Communications Technology

As we have seen, Anderson shows that print capitalism evolved how humankind organized politically by promoting vernacular languages, broadening the geographic understanding of community from those people one interacts with to those people one shares a language with, and evolving humankind’s concept of simultaneity to account for the understanding that, while one may not see evidence of it, community members throughout the nation were going about their day and living life just as assuredly as they were. These forces led humankind to develop the nations that populate the map today: America, Russia, France, China, and so on. Today, everyone has a nationality the same way they have a gender and nations, and their conflicting goals have driven world history over the past three centuries. If these monumental outcomes stemmed from how print capitalism altered the concepts of community and people’s abilities to form it, it is urgent to look closely at how the new digital communications technology of the 21st century may effect group formation in the future. 

Our Relationship with Simultaneity is Changing Again

In Anderson’s formulation, community relied on the “confidence of community in anonymity” that was provided by people’s expanding conception of simultaneity. The belief that throughout a nation, one’s compatriots were simultaneously living a life similar in language, culture, and experience unpins the idea of an imagined community. While an individual may only ever meet a few hundred of those compatriots, it was assumed that life was unfolding for them day by day in a way characteristic of their shared nation, whether they lived a few stops down the railway or a few hundred miles down the coast. In the 21st century, cyberspace and the platforms that help users navigate it have altered the part of this equation that Anderson called ‘anonymity.’ Nowadays, we can seek out, find biographical information on, and initiate communication with as many of our compatriots as we wish. 

Due to digital communications technologies, community is less anonymous and therefore less imagined. Simultaneity is no longer based on Anderson’s idea of “confidence in community in anonymity,” but on the proof of that community flashing across the various digital communications channels accessible via a computer or a smartphone. You can access the profiles of the individuals who make up your community to learn who they are and what they think, without ever meeting them. Without, in fact, ever leaving the comfort of your own screen. Now, the internet has introduced new tools of anonymity for users looking to present a different identity and does present limited and potentially strategic profiles of people. However, overall three major factors have decreased the amount of anonymity in one’s community and by extension the amount of imagining required to conjure that community.

First, the amount of information available about random members of a community is much greater now that the means of publication and dissemination are available to anyone who can afford a smartphone. Second, new types of information about members of a community are available that are specific to cyberspace. Friend lists, media subscriptions, search history, and geolocation data all provide specific data points about people that weren’t available in earlier periods. All of the background imagery, possessions, tastes, influences, and experiences on display through the video and photo content that users publish paints a detailed qualitative picture of their life and personality. Combined with the more traditional breadcrumbs of public information available about people like their education history, professional history, high school sports performance statistics, addresses, and value of their home and it is incredible how fully one can get to know a member of their community without ever meeting them. Third, all of this information is searchable and, when not blocked by privacy settings, available to people who don’t yet know who they are looking for. If a person, we’ll call her Jane, wants to determine whether their child should accept an athletic scholarship at one university versus another, they could look up the names of the players on that team that graduated 5 years ago, find their social profiles, and determine based on their job experience provided on LinkedIn, the photos they’ve posted to Instagram, the media outlets they follow on Twitter, the tax map of their town, and Google’s street view of their neighborhood whether or not they are living the type of life Jane wants for her eventual-college graduate. In effect, communities of various types can be explored and vetted prior to membership.

While the above example focuses on the tactical uses of these new communications technologies, it is clear how little imagining was involved. According to the Global Web Index, the average person has 8.6 social media accounts and spends 2 hours and 24 minutes on those platforms. But at the societal level, the impact of this type of information availability has irrevocable altered Anderson’s idea of the community being something that is imagined. The online profiles of the people who make up your communities are out there, available for you to peruse if you so choose. Simultaneity is not something that is only imagined anymore. Its existence is being documented constantly. 

Digital Languages are New Vernacular Languages

Digital communications technologies are changing the way people communicate in many of the same ways that print capitalism did. As Anderson details, consuming the world as described in vernacular languages as opposed to just sacral truth languages like Latin or Classical Arabic had an enormous effect on the types of groups humans formed. Anderson argues that the vernacular languages that were normalized via print capitalism, such as English, French, or Spanish, “Laid the bases for national conscious in three distinct ways.” As we will see, these same effects are reoccurring now as digital communications technologies change the mediums of communication. 

First, Anderson writes that printing books and newspapers in vernacular languages “created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above spoken vernaculars” that allowed speakers of different dialects to comprehend each other and to form a national group. While an Alsatian and a Parisian may not have been able to understand each other’s dialects in earlier periods, once they began to read the same print-language they could communicate in the newly unified print-language of French. In cyberspace, because the means of publication are under individual control as opposed to that of an editorial authority, languages evolve organically through the exposure that content in one digital dialect receives amongst speakers of a different digital dialect. 

Involved in Anderson’s idea of the print-language is how it generated a hierarchy among dialects, and this still holds sway in cyberspace. The validity of previously marginalized  dialects is reinforced by their visual representation on the screens and within the newsfeeds of all digital users. The same way that print-languages enabled fragmentation within the global imagined communities of Christendom, Islam, and the Middle Kingdom, digital communication technologies are enabling further fragmentation within states. While some vernaculars were not represented in print-capitalism due to economic viability (Anderson cites Platt Deutsch as an example), there is no cost-benefit analysis done by the modern, solo publisher before they hit ‘Send’ on their message. Whether they are communicating in proper English, a rural Appalachian dialect, an urban slang, abbreviations derived from constraints of a T9 phone keypad, emojis, or memes, there is no economic consideration to make before publishing because the marginal cost of the act of publishing is now effectively free.

Second, print-languages “gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build the image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.” Prior to print-capitalism’s spread, written material was hand-written and subject to “unconscious modernizing” by the scribes who produced it and, over time, old texts became incomprehensible as the language was unconsciously modernized. But the printed book was a different matter, since it captured language in a physical object at once distinct and multiplicitous; instead of there being one copy of a manuscript, everyone could have the same book. Digital communications technology has split this characteristic in two. On one hand, language is more fixed than ever before. So much of what has ever been published on the internet is available right now, and tools like archive.org, as well as behaviors like screenshoting or saving local copies of digital content mean that the ideas and experiences that are communicated are preserved in perpetuity. On the other hand, because everyone is a publisher, language itself can modernize, to extend Anderson’s idea, at the speed of culture. Groups can now form around shared ideas and experiences that have not been edited or reviewed or censored, exemplified most recently by the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements that prior to social media faced editorial and economic obstacles to being published and shared.

Third, print-languages “created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars” (page 45). The dialects that were most similar to what developed as the print language were seen as more central to the culture of the nation, and the proximity of ones grammar to that of the print language was a factor in social hierarchy. To return to a prior example, the dialect spoken by Parisians held more sway over the development of French than the dialect spoken by the Alsatians. This rule still holds significant sway online. Users with large followers, or users who get high engagement on their content in the form of likes or comments after going viral, who communicate in specific dialects or digital languages lend authority to those dialects.

For all that digital communications technologies are doing to change the way we communicate, they are also ushering us back towards earlier communications methods in at least one way: the importance of visuals. As mentioned above, the characters of sacral languages held importance that regular letters did not. Anderson points out how “until quite recently, the Qur’an was literally untranslatable…because Allah’s truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic.” Similarly, in Christendom the visual grandeur and decorative details of the European cathedrals and the stained glass windows, along with the presence of relics, did as much to explain the faith as the words between the covers of the Bible. 

Everyone knows the old adage that, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” The key to understanding the importance of visuals to sacral communities is that the picture, or the object),communicates a thousand words that can’t be communicated in another way. It can of course be described, but ekphrasis lessens its worth. With the multimedia capabilities of digital technologies, this phenomenon is re-entering communications. Websites and social media platforms allow users to integrate text, photos, voice recordings, and videos in ways that were not previously possible. 

The technological evolution of vernacular language is elegantly summed up by, of all things, the meme. At first glass a meme, with its combination of image and text, looks like nothing more than a traditional cartoon strip. But over time one sees a meme used to respond to a variety of different situations and it begins to communicate more than simply a quippy response to the viewer. There is cultural context inherent in the meme, and the more iterations of the meme populate the communications channels, for example your Instagram feed, the more depth it communicates to the viewer. To make a sacrilegious comparison, the meme is the stained glass window of the internet — to fully appreciate it you need to know the story behind it, but it’s not going to tell you that story itself.

Everyone has an extralocal community in their pocket

Anderson’s third factor that led to the development of the modern state was the exposure of more people to extralocal communities, which is at work again in the 21st century restructuring how people form political communities. In summary, Anderson shows how the spread of print capitalism gave more people access to an extralocal community, therefore spreading their concept of their group beyond the individuals they saw in the local village each day. While the aristocracy, the clergy, and traders had long had exposure to people beyond their geographical location, most people did not. With the advent of print capitalism, as detailed above, people were able to read about those in distant cities in newspapers and novels, understand that the individuals they were reading about spoke their language or shared their culture, and conceive that they shared something in common and belonged to the same group.

Digital communications technologies have drastically increased this type of extralocal exposure. Obviously, the internet allows people to communicate independent of geography. Translation tools built into many internet browsers and applications mean that, to a certain degree, people can communicate beyond their language group without ever joining another language group. The messaging capabilities built into many of these same applications enable easy one-to-one communication, as opposed to learning about one’s community members through a third-party, such as the newspaper reporter. But in addition to the technical advancements in how people are able to communicate beyond their local community, there is also a change happening around what shared commonalities they can organize around.

Digital communications technologies have made people information producers in addition to the information consumers they were in the era of print capitalism when the means of publication was controlled by editorial authorities. This means that, as people publish their experiences, characteristics, and opinions online, they are providing other people a fuller introduction to themselves than ever would have been available in the media of print capitalism. Now, instead of identifying with distant members of a community based on the vagaries of shared language or culture, people can form communities around specific political viewpoints, causes, policies, or beliefs by finding other people online who have posted about the same thing.

Now, individuals have the ability to form communities based on experiences, characteristics, and opinions they share with other people which they never would have learned of through gate-keeper media, and they can do it independent of geography, shared language, and to a certain extent time, since the content one person comes across may have been published days, weeks, or years earlier. If the changes outlined by Anderson in Imagined Communities lead to the formation of the modern state and all the events, good and terrible, that that has wrought over the past 300 years, then the changes occurring in our own time portend another significant shift in how communities form and confront each other. 

The following examples outline three political communities that would not have formed if not for the innovations of digital communications technologies: a separatist revolt in a rural Mexican state that garnered worldwide support through digital exposure; a terrorist organization recruiting fighters from around the world online; and a political party in Brazil that coalesced in large part due to YouTube’s algorithmic content suggestions.

Section II: The New Communities of the Cyber Capitalism

Mexico: The Zapatista Movement Grows Online

The changes articulated above are not exclusively driven by the social media platforms of the 21st century. On January 1, 1994, prior to anything that a smartphone user with a Twitter account would recognize as a social media platform was available online, the Zapatista movement in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas revolted. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), representing the indigenous population of Chiapas, rose up on the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was announced, seeking autonomy from Mexico and therefore control of their land, which was threatened by industrial farming enabled by the new trade deal. Writing in 2001, Garrido and Halavais point out, “What makes the Zapatista movement unique from a historical perspective…has been its extensive use of the Internet as a tool for global mobilization.” 

The leader of the EZLN was known as Subcomandante Marcos, and he was online “two days after the uprising.” While the kinetic conflict with the EZLN was subdued by the Mexican Army in less than two weeks, the digital portion of the movement would prove much more resilient. In their book LikeWar, Singer and Brooking write, “…the war became a bloodless political struggle, sustained by a global network of enthusiasts and admirers, most of whom had never even heard of Chiapas before the call to action went out.” Through media coverage, a website, and nowadays a Facebook page that reaches over 150,000 people, the EZLN movement has been able to build an international community of supporters who donate resources, provide legitimacy when dealing with the Mexican government, and enable the further pursuit of the movement’s political goals. Subcomandante Marcos made a strategic move that would mimicked by my digital community builders in the years to come: he broadened the Zapatista message to be about indigenous rights and then, even more broadly, about minority rights in the face of neoliberalism. This big tent strategy meant that a very diverse group could imagine their beliefs and goals being reinforced and fought for by the EZLN.

Markus Schulz argued that the success of this community, and the donations it provides, has made the “Zapatistas less…dependent on their internal military organization than on the support they receive from individuals and associations that are explicitly not part of the EZLN.” While that may have been obvious when it was written in 1998, the ability to join and participate in a community online has increased dramatically over the past two decades and it is less clear today that a donor from organizations like the Chiapas Support Committee in Oakland, California or the Wellington Zapatista Support Group in New Zealand is “explicitly not part of the EZLN.” 

ISIS: Terror Goes Viral

Writing in Wired magazine in 2016, Brendan Koerner described how the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) leverages the changes happening in communications methods to cast a wider recruitment net than any of its jihadist predecessors. “The Islamic State is as much a media conglomerate as a fighting force,” writes Koerner, releasing, “on average, 38 new items per day—20-minute videos, full-length documentaries, photo essays, audio clips, and pamphlets, in languages ranging from Russian to Bengali.” The volume of content production is significant, but the factors that make it effective only partially rely on quantity. Riding the crest of the trends examined above, ISIS successfully targets potential recruits, communicates in vernacular languages rather than solely in Arabic, and uses documentation techniques so that those sympathizers who see their content can feel as if they are there on the ground, providing a strong sense of simultaneity. 

ISIS uses extreme content to catch the attention of potential sympathizers, sharing videos of beheadings, suicide bombings, and battle footage on major social media platforms and forums online. While content moderators do quickly remove violent content from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, ISIS’s content spreads rapidly and, once published, it is nearly impossible to prevent those interested in finding it again from doing so. Taking it one step further, ISIS leverages “narrowcasting—creating varied content that caters to niche audiences,” to get different recruiting messages to different groups. A more recent study at Columbia University found that gruesome content, even though it is what captures the headlines, is far from ISIS’s most effective niche. Conducted in 2019, the study found, “the vast majority of ISIS’s Twitter followers were inspired by propaganda emphasizing the personal benefits that people could supposedly enjoy by joining the group — benefits like getting a free home in the caliphate, finding a spouse, and feeling camaraderie with fellow fighters.” The fact that a terrorist group can publish content emphasizing the “personal benefits” of membership at all is an example of the types of content that people can identify with, and form a community around, in the 21st century that never would have been possible in the era of print capitalism. 

The group also embraces the idea that on social media, the average person is able to share their opinions and experiences instead of having to get information through elites like news anchors or columnists. Koerner describes the ways this takes shape: 

“Perhaps most important, this content always places the stories of ordinary fighters front and center—a sharp break from the approach favored by al Qaeda, whose media has typically focused on elite figures like Zawahiri. ‘They moved the focus from individuals who are patricians to jihadis who speak the street language, the vernacular,’ says Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. That shift in narrative perspective has put the Islamic State in sync with a generation that is accustomed to creating and sharing its own content. When young viewers check out the Islamic State’s videos, then, they can imagine themselves right there on the screen.”

ISIS also leverages all of the documentation technology available to produce content that magnifies the viewers feelings of being “right there on the screen.” For example, in a video titled, The Meaning of Stability #2, a suicide bomber is introduced on camera before driving away in his vehicle laden with explosives. A drone follows the vehicle until the decisive moment, recording the entire episode in a way that had never been done before. Another documentation tactic that enhances the experience of simultaneity is ISIS fighters strapping GoPro cameras to their rifles, “…resulting in first-person scenes that seem plucked from [a] video game.” Combined with narrowcasting content in various languages, featuring everyday jihadis instead of elite leaders, and highlighting the personal benefits of membership, ISIS is utilizing all of the tools at their disposal to reach a wider audience than previously possible and to put a more engrossing sales pitch in from of them than their predecessors could have imagined. The impact of these communications have been, according to the United States Department of State, up to 40,000 foreign fighters recruited to join the conflict in Syria.

Brazil: An Algorithm Forms a Political Party

While the cases of Chiapas and ISIS have shown how groups can gain support, and then membership, to further their political goals through the dissemination of the right type of content online, they both focus on the human manipulation of the digital communications technologies. In Brazil, on the other hand, the human element has been significantly sidelined by algorithmic content recommendations. The result has been a rapid expansion of the far right political party and the eventual elevation of one of its ranks, Jair Bolsonaro, to the presidency. Members of the party “say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.”

Maurício Martins is the Vice President of Mr. Bolonsaro’s Alliance for Brazil party in Niterói, an outlying part of the greater Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. But he wasn’t always a politician. Interviewed for the New York Times, Martins recalls, 

“He was killing time on [Youtube] one day…when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another.
 

“‘Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,’ Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were ‘my political education.’”

Youtube had recently updated its artificial intelligence capabilities in an attempt to improve the content recommendations it was suggesting viewers watch as soon as a video finished. While YouTube’s goal was to maximize the time people spent watching videos on the site, the videos that were generating the most engagement in Brazil were frequently far right conspiracy theories, so the recommendation engine began showing more and more of that kind of content. The more Brazilians heard details of these conspiracy theories coming from all sorts of different videos, the easier they were to believe.

Bolsonaro was one of the people making those types of videos, though without much political success to speak of. But when YouTube introduced its recommendation engine to Brazil, the “far-right [audience], where [Bolsonaro] was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.” Carlos Jordy, a member of Brazil’s federal legislature and of the Alliance for Brazil party, also owes his political success to the content he published on YouTube: “If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be [in the legislature]. Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”

In Conclusion 

This paper has shown how the advancements of digital communications technologies since the early 1990’s have fractured, re-oriented, and intensified the forces that drive political community formation. The impact that print capitalism, as identified by Benedict Anderson, had on people’s concepts use of language, breadth of exposure, and very concept of the simultaneity of the world around them forged the type of modern nation most of the world lives in today. As the Zapatista movement in Mexico, ISIS’s global recruitment success, and the rise of the Alliance for Brazil party show, the forces of digital communication technologies are changing the way that groups form. Technological advancements have removed almost all barriers to community formation, local or extralocal, and humankind is able to experience a level of simultaneity above and beyond anything previously possible. Language is again able to unconsciously modernize on digital communications platforms, while reincorporating the power of visual that print capitalism temporarily excluded. These new groups, some of which form based on the algorithmic exposure to ideas they may not have come across on their own, are able to take political action in ways that were not previously possible. Understanding how these groups form and how their ideas spread is a crucial step in determining the types of challenges and opportunities awaiting mankind in the era of cyber capitalism. 

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1982. 

Covington, Paul, et al. “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations.” Google Research, 2016, research.google/pubs/pub45530/.

Craig, David. “How ISIS Really Recruits Its Members.” Columbia Magazine, 2019, magazine.columbia.edu/article/how-isis-really-recruits-its-members. 

Fisher, Max, and Amanda Taub. “How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html. 

Silver, Laura. “Smartphone Ownership Is Growing Rapidly Around the World, but Not Always Equally.” Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, 25 Aug. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/02/05/smartphone-ownership-is-growing-rapidly-around-the-world-but-not-always-equally/. 

Garrido , Maria, and Alexander Halavais. “Mapping Networks of Support for the Zapatista Movement: Applying Social Networks Analysis to Study Contemporary Social Movements.” 2001. 

“How Many People Use Social Media in 2020? (65+ Statistics).” Backlinko, 12 Aug. 2020, backlinko.com/social-media-users. 

Koerner, Brendan I. “Why ISIS Is Winning the Social Media War.” Wired, Conde Nast, 14 Oct. 2020, www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-beat/. 

Singer, P. W., and Emerson T. Brooking. LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 

Why People Buy a Tent Only to Post It on Instagram

Part 1: Marketing Is Beyond Your Control

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

— Oscar Wilde said that.

Nowadays, people want to imitate brands far more than most brands deserve.

— I’m saying that.

The lines between entertainment and advertising are blurring more and more everyday. Everyone has a brand, everyone is a publisher, and they are all searching for experiences and products to help them tell their stories. The best companies have already adapted to this, and are working with their audiences to spread a collaborative brand story. 

This development in consumer behavior is the biggest opportunity awaiting consumer brands in the coming decade.

Welcome to the emergence of Participatory Marketing.

As the digital and social media marketing landscapes have matured and consolidated, two important things happened that most brands have not adapted to:

First, people have gotten smarter about advertising because they see it so often, and now tune it out at a higher rate than ever before. Check out these stats:

1. 91% of people say ads are more intrusive today than 2-3 years ago

2. 87% say there are more ads in general than 2-3 years ago

3. 79%feel like they’re being tracked by retargeted ads

Ad blocker usage also continues to rise:

Second, social media has given individuals the tools to grow brand platforms of their own. Now, the products and services a company provides are being used as plot points and props in brand stories that regular, everyday people are telling and monetizing across Instagram, YouTube, and other social platforms.

We’ve entered the age of screen time, all the time. Just how much time are people spending on social media?

Fact: As of 2015, 1 in every 5 minutes an American spent on a mobile device is on Facebook or Instagram.

Fact: People spend close to 2 hours and 20 minutes per day online on their phone. (Zenith) 

While people are ignoring pop ups, muting TV commercials, or driving past billboards, they are looking for, viewing, saving, and sharing the content that’s important to them on social platforms. These digital platforms are the connective tissue between all your other marketing channels because they are always available and always getting our attention. If a brand is not pulling all the threads laid out in other channels together on social, then they’re missing the keystone in your marketing strategy. 

Sounds hard, right? 

Well...yes, it is. At first. 

But this shift is good news for a lot of consumer brands, but outdoor gear brands are uniquely equipped to benefit from it. 

Here’s why. 

Outdoor products enable some of the most compelling stories that individuals, influencers, and smaller brands are telling online. For everyone following along, the products come to epitomize the stories they’re featured in. Buying the tent only to post it on social media may seem insane at first glance, but those consumers don’t want the tent. They want the content to reinforce their personal brand.

---

Part 2: Your Company Needs a Brand Narrative to Create Fans

What, exactly, is going on online? 

When people look back a thousand years from now on the blip in time that witnessed the creation of social media, the way they’ll understand it was the continuation of the democratization of publishing. What does that mean? 

Here are the highlights:

1. The invention of the printing press, the newspaper, the novel, the television, all the way up to blogs, Instagram accounts, and live streaming can be looked at as a continual loosening of the editorial constraints on expression, and the democratization of publishing.

2. Overall, more and more people are gaining the ability to express themselves, albeit in different mediums, at each point along the way. 

3. With the explosion of smartphones and social media over the last 10 years, the tools to share your own personal story through words, images, and video became available in a single small device that fits in our pockets.
   

Telling your story has never been easier.

Sharing your story, whatever it is, is significantly easier to do today (via words, photos, and videos), than it has ever been in the history of the world. From personal experiences to branded messaging, whatever we deem interesting or important can now be broadcast through a variety of mediums to an effectively limitless audience. 

All from one device. 

And people can interact with it. In real time! 

So, here’s the big idea:

What is driving this ever-increasing fixation on social platforms is the constant source of other people’s life stories that it offers, and the unrealized ability to share our own with the world that it presents. People are looking for blueprints to emulate as they tell their stories, and the smartest brands are filling that void in ways that benefit both the brand and the customer.

It shouldn’t be a huge surprise then that people don’t have much time to look at ads on the internet anymore. 

---

Part 3: Here’s the Story Your Brand Should Be Telling

Now that we’re all on the same page about what’s happening online, let’s think about your brands again. Outdoor gear brands makes products that help people go on adventures. Most stories are about adventures. People now have all the tools to match up with their human compulsion to read and tell stories. So… they are probably looking for supplies for their adventures, right? 

The Problem: Most people are not good storytellers. And even for those who are, storytelling is hard.

The Solution: An effective brand narrative.

What Makes an Effective Brand Narrative? 

Brands can give consumers the tools and guidance on how their products, their services, and their brands as a whole can aid that consumer in telling their own story. Just show them a consistent example, and let them do the rest. 

Consistency is key, but that doesn’t mean a brand narrative is made up of rigid guidelines. Brand narratives rely on a consistent organizing principle that inspires endless conversation rather than a single brand message (like a tagline, for example) used to hit consumer over the head until they buy something. While that organizing principle stays constant across all your marketing channels, it can manifest itself slightly differently depending on each channel’s specifications, user expectations, demographics, and position in the buyer journey.

What Is An Organizing Principle? 

An organizing principle is the main idea around which a brand is experienced by consumers. Harley Davidson’s organizing principle is the freedom of the open road. Apple’s organizing principle is better design. Nike’s organizing principle is transcendence through athletics. At its best it is consistent, but able to be personalized in the hands of the consumer. 

So, how does a company craft a brand narrative, based on an organizing principle, that people will want to join in on and make their own? It needs the right quantities of the following attributes, in proportions appropriate for your brand.

Entertaining 

First things first, a brand needs to catch a user’s attention. It needs to stand out on busy and competitive online content platforms. Whether they leverage beautiful content, humor, vulnerability, beauty, great design, important information or something else, the brands that earner user attention online are, at minimum, entertaining their audiences. 

Aspirational 

It’s important to differentiate between Inspire and Aspire. Providing inspiration, creating the urge within your consumer to do something, is nice. But it’s also fleeting. Providing your audience with that initial inspiration as well as the long-term aspirations to back it up is how to grow an engaged community. Your brand’s content should inspire your consumers to aspire to a goal. That goal will be different for different brands. Some brands should motivate their customers to have all the gear they need to be prepared for their next great adventure. Others should inspire their customers to become better stewards of the environment. Still others should push their customers to get outside to reconnect with themselves or loved ones away from the day’s distractions. Whatever aspiration your brand provides should align with your organizing principle.

Actionable 

When a consumer decides to follow along with a brand, via social media, newsletters, or catalogues, they are making a commitment of their time and attention. For that commitment to have real staying power, the brand needs to go beyond entertainment and aspirations. Providing actionable content is key. For most brands, this can simply be updates on new products, sales, maintenance recommendations, or curated accessory suggestions. But there are tactics beyond the basics, whether that means highlighting worthy causes they can support, producing educational content so they can get the most out of your products, or sharing curated information the brand has gleaned from being an authority in the space. A brand should provide consumers with everything they need to take action, to ensure they’ll keep coming back for more.

Joinable 

Brand loyalty in today’s world is based on people feeling like they are participating in a community rather than yelling into the void. Whether it’s through events and causes, or a shared mission, or simply a hashtag that consumers can identify with, creating a feeling of belonging and community is key.

Pay Off 

Whether it’s promotions, giveaways, or freebies, consumers want an incentive over and above the prior points to let a brand occupy the real estate on their social feeds and in their inbox. It takes time and attention to follow a brand, even passively, and brands need to offer something in exchange for that.

---

If your company’s organizing principle can deliver on these 5 characteristics, you’re good to go. Wrapping it up in a clear and concise brand narrative ensures that various members of your team, outside agency partners, and other vendors will all be aligned on how to communicate your brand’s story.

Chances are, you’ve got a community of customers chomping at the bit to tell stories online. And your products are part of the toolkit they need to do that. In a future where consumers benefit more from the endless hours we all spend looking at screens, brand narratives will have taken the place of ad copy and recycled stock photos, and we’ll all be better off.