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.
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