Nation No More — Social Media as a Tribalizer

Image by Pete Simon

Nation is an imagined identity indeed. When our community’s population surpasses Dunbar’s famous 150 people threshold, when it is no longer possible to connect with every single member of your community in a meaningful and sustainable way, the community becomes an image living only in your mind, and your surroundings turn into the society.

Nation, in this regard, was one of the greatest achievements of human evolution, it is a social extension that enables a more sophisticated, efficient and durable way of life for the species. It enables projects that require diverse, distinct and disconnected components to cooperate. All that is modern, that is contributory to human survival owe their existence to Nation. The crucial aspect here is that Nation is imagined — not imaginary. It is as imaginary as football, or maths. It is just a social extension, it is a cognitive conception, therefore real.

This imaginedness perhaps is best expressed by a Turkish poet, Yahya Kemal, in his poem Üsküdar’s Friendly Lights. The poet watches the city lights of Üsküdar district across the Bosphorus and contemplates about the hypothetical sources of those lights — they are, perhaps people mourning a loss in the late night. Perhaps not, but what follows is the best expression of an imagined community: “Having never met physically in person, I am now seeing you with your real faces — you are the ones who make this moment Türk with your lights.” Those undefined people shrouded in a quantum uncertainty state are, indeed, what makes Üsküdar Turkish, for they live in our minds and thanks to them we have a feeling of belonging.

But what if we “determine” the sources of those lights, absolving the quantum uncertainity? We might probably see a stern father who beats his children for no reason, who, perhaps, exploits his wife, spits on the street. Perhaps the wife is a devout follower of some cult, who believes young girls wearing mini skirts deserve to be cast into the everlasting flames of God’s hell. Perhaps the boy that live in the house that emits the light we picked amongst all and struck us with the most divine inspiration, is one of the social media trolls who make us sick. Indeed, what if?

Does the social media connect people in an unprecedented way and create a virtual sphere? No sir — I used to like my people, my community living in my mind as an idea before I was able to see how they would behave should anonymity allow them to go undetected. It is like migrating from your rural, modest village to a big city: In the village, everyone knows each other and probably each other’s families, therefore exploitation would surely cause retribution and sanction. You can trick people, of course, but once you do so, the word goes around, you would be ostracized or, in accordance with the severity of your deed, some angry mob would gather around your barn with torches. In the city, it is another story — we all have heard of a pretender who faked some illness, fainted in the middle of the street to exploit the compassion of passers-by. We all have heard of a beggar who pretends to be handicapped, when the police confronts him, runs faster than a 100 meter sprinter. Those people, even though they get scolded when caught, or even arrested, eventually go back to their business — you cannot track them personally and noone wanders around with their criminal record hanging from their necks.

This close-knit community of the village sometimes can be overwhelming, restricting the individual for instance. In rural Turkey, for example, your family members would not let any stranger “beat you” — but in return, they can beat you themselves. The city life is what rehabilitates these sick kin-relations, no doubt. However, in the city your primordial instincts are in alert state for you are no longer safe — a safety taken for granted in the village. Then, you choose either to keep a low profile, create a close-knit community of your own and live within the virtual boundaries of it, or you subscribe to a “horde”, when the level of your fear is higher, when you are unable to create your own close-knit community or when your state of alertness makes you unsatisfied with most precautions. During crises, this subscription to “horde” increases, masses flock to banners which best address their fears and instincts, and then the reason is no more. The species which has written Iliad, built Sistine Chapel or mapped the stars, devolve into the apes they are descended from. To quote Daniel Richardson, masses don’t share information, they share biases.

This is the social media — there are now hordes, which foolishly clash with each other paying no mind to any supreme moral value or something like that; and close-knit communities. As Zizi Papacharissi said in her 2002 essay The Virtual Sphere, “As the virtual mass becomes subdivided into smaller and smaller discussion groups, the ideal of a public sphere that connects many people online eludes us.”

The more I get to know my own people, the more I loathe them. These perpetual and tremendous amount of messages bombarding me everyday is now making me paranoid: I used to pray for the random people who I met on the street, I used to wish the best for them when I saw a smiling glance, or a simple good gesture. Now I suspect if that guy is one of those who claims “Wives of X supporters will be ours.” There are masks of anonymity in the social media, but we know there are real faces behind those masks and the quantum uncertainity which once created Nation is now reversed: I am no longer sure if a random guy is a “good guy.”

These are the thoughts triggered by our interview with Zizi Papacharissi, she was more optimistic, yet I see disintegration of the “whole.” There is no longer “whole” but horde, no longer individual but “member.” A virtual sphere, a network that brings people closer than ever is yet to be achieved. People who thought it would lessen the influence of national idenity and promote a “global culture” could not have been more wrong, it is now disintegrating even Nation and replacing it with tribes. Nations can communicate with each other, and contribute to a super-civilization, but tribes cannot.

Will a new “polytheism” heal the yearning and hunger of people for multi-stories, and the detrimental effects caused by the prevalence of mono-story for too long as Odo Marquard once prophesized? I do not know, for now, I am just amazed at myself still being able to identify as a nationalist but being disgusted by the members of my nation.

M. Bahadırhan Dinçaslan