January 20, 2023

Nations without borders

Recently I was skimming the European Data Protection Supervisor’s 24/2022 Opinion on the Proposal for a Regulation establishing a common framework for media services in the internal market (European Media Freedom Act) and amending Directive 2010/13/EU.1 As one does. And something stood out to me as fundamentally wrong. Or perhaps, right, but for the wrong reasons. 

Here’s the statement that struck me as completely misunderstanding how online communities work and the rôle information has within those communities.

“[o]nline manipulation poses a threat to society because filter bubbles and walled communities make it harder for people to understand each other and share experiences” and that “[t]he weakening of this ‘social glue’ may undermine democracy as well as several other fundamental rights and freedoms”. 2

The problem is very simple: they’re confusing the creation of international communities with the collapse of national ones. This isn’t weakened social glue, it’s the formation of new communities with borders that aren’t strictly defined by states. That can’t be seen on maps.

The internet enables a nationalism of ideas rather than geography and accidents of birth. For example the 40+ million strong BTS Army is a nation united by love of the k-pop band BTS. They dwarf most European nations in size. If BTS wanted to disrupt a European state’s government infrastructure, they could. Easily. 

Nationalism without geography.

We all inhabit an individually curated information sphere, or filter bubble. But these are so much more than “filters” — they are social communities.

People’s identities will place them into different communities. e.g. father, husband, football coach, home team fan, citizen and so on. Each identity is part of a community of shared interests. These communities are social groups of people who share an identity. 

One of the more powerful ways to reinforce group identity is not by establishing shared values, ideas, elements, etc. Instead making it clear that what defines “us” from “them” is by identifying a common feature of the Other. For example, hundreds of years ago there were two communities of American Indians living on the west coast in essentially the same ecosystem. One farmed and the other did not. This wasn’t about lack of knowledge or profound difference of opinion about how to best exploit the environment, it was fundamentally about identity. *They* farm, *we* don’t.

What social media does is it removes a geographic boundary, the location limitation, on finding people with shared interests. Joining communities is easier now than before. This means that more niche interests can find a community, allowing an associated identity to grow in salience for the individual. It is possible to be part of more communities (quantity) and more specific communities (quality.) 

These are mostly very good for top tier Maslow’s hierarchy of needs “self actualisation.” People can pursue their interests within a community, no matter how niche that interest is. The drawbacks are somewhat obvious.

When people talk about a “filter bubble” what they mean is “a community.” But modern communities do not correspond as closely to locality as in the past. There were exceptions, of course. The Star Trek community for example is international and has an extremely salient identity for many people. 

In the past the problem for people was that if they couldn’t find the community that shared their passion, they would have to try the next most salient identity-community pair. Because of the limitations of communications technology back then, the most salient and most accessible community was local. The filter bubble of times past was the local newspaper and the local bar.

In the modern era, we can find a community-identity match much easier, so there is no need to look for other less-salient communities. As a result people’s identity as “citizen” has a lot more competition for salience than before. But this is true for many identities. 

Where this starts to become annoying for states is that these new communities-of-interest also have their own cultures, norms, politics and dynamics. Plus of course their own fads and trends. Community members are exposed to “information pressure” that can change their sense-making for other identities. 

Information pressure: information and knowledge that is part of the shared culture of that community, where “everyone knows” X to be true or false, or whatever. It’s the implicit need to conform to the community’s shared information canon. 

The community’s information canon then creates a “knowledge-lens” which shapes how a person interprets new information. This knowledge-lens becomes part of how they do sense-making. Even in other identities. 

Social media is not eroding the social glue that holds society together. It is encouraging competing social groups to form, and these are part of the aggregate pressure that is weakening social ties in older larger communities. The ones where people are less inclined to join if there are alternatives. 

Social media allows other identities to find communities which strengthen those identities. The result is that these other identities can be more salient, more intense, for longer durations. Which obviously weakens larger less powerful communities because their command for identity salience is weaker compared to other more niche identities. 

Social media doesn’t weaken the social glue, it creates other stronger communities that people belong to *instead of* larger traditional society groups, such as nations.