How Social Media Impacts Global Sociocultural Systems
All human societies are sociocultural systems. It’s where the 60’s saying “it’s the system, man” came from as we began to realize this in greater detail and outside of mostly academia. Culture is the knowledge we use to navigate our lives and societies are what we form to to determine economics, politics, rules and so on. When it comes to social media, much of the discussions we hear across news media and online are around disinformation, fake news, cyberbullying. How they’re impacting our lives. As I’ve written before, there is much good to social media too. What we need to do now, is step back and take a macro level look at social media and society.
In this article, I’m really just touching on the highlights, pointing to a macro view of social media’s impacts on our global society. This subject alone is worth at least a book or two and many research papers. So bare with me for just touching the main points. Also, we don’t have an overarching set of research to define an evidence backed hypotheses. That will come over time.
Communications technologies have always played a crucial role in our species ability to organize as well as develop and share cultural ideas and values. From cave wall drawings through to today’s internet. TV, radio, the telephone, print, satellites, all gave us the ability to communicate at scale globally. But they are largely broadcast technologies, expensive to build and maintain. Phones, telegraph, limited mediums. The internet is the biggest game changer. When it moved out of the hippies domain and academia to the consumer world, everything began to change. The internet of today enables near real-time two-way communications at scale.
When code and hardware became cheaper and much, much easier to use with little technical skills required, along came social media. Things really began to change. The barriers of time and space that provided a buffer between cultures and societies which gave us the ability to consider what we might adopt in terms of technologies from other cultures, along with ideas and knowledge, were suddenly gone.
Things didn’t change overnight. We humans love to think that big global changes happen suddenly. Like one day we were out in the woods foraging for nuts and berries and we woke up the next morning and decided to start farming. Or that one day we invented machines and the Industrial Age began. It’s never been like that. Ever. Agriculture was around for thousands of years, on and off, some societies liking it, others rejecting it. It took a very long time, thousands of years, to become something many human societies did. In terms of mass production, that was going on in ancient Egypt, centuries before big machines. Granted, humans were doing most of the work, but they did use some primitive technologies (which at that time, were rather advanced).
As the internet penetrated many societies and crossed many cultures so quickly, it has impacted our global sociocultural systems much faster than previous technologies. To many, that’s a known. What we did not predict or know, or take time to really consider, at that time, was the impacts it would have at a macro level. Good and bad. Social media was going to save democracy. The opposite has happened. Social media was going to foster great human dialogue. In many ways it has. We also got trolls, doxxing, divisive memes and so on.
When it comes to sociocultural systems on a global scale, this is perhaps, where truly profound changes are underway. Changes that will impact human cultures and societies even more than they already have. It’s also harder to look at them because they’re at a macro level and humans struggle to look at big pictures and truly long-term implications. Look at how we’re dealing with climate change as one macro level example.
One of the biggest looming changes is the nature of our societies and how we govern ourselves. If Marx, Durkheim and Weber, leading thinkers of sociology, were alive today and on a podcast together it would truly be fascinating. Social Media enabled mass communications and organising in the Arab Spring of 2011. Authoritarian governments fought back and won. Only Tunisia remained democratic and even that country is sliding into authoritarianism. Democratic governments are still failing at understanding this. Fighting disinformation and foreign political interference in Western democracies remains largely the bane of academia and concerned citizens and not government.
Hopefully, democracy will survive and capitalism (the good kind.) But changes are likely coming. The democratic systems of today will evolve. How? We can’t truly know, but we could do some speculating. Social media have been a boon for politicians that know how to work it. As well, it has lead to the demise of some politicians as well.
In terms of culture, we are also seeing macro level changes. The mixing of bagpipes and reggae as an interesting example (it actually works), the renaissance of Native American cultures into mainstream society. People using social media to tell others, especially big brands, what cultural appropriation is and why it’s bad. The MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter. All critical to shaping a modern society. A long term risk is that some cultures will disappear into some more global mix. A sort of global culture. Is that good or bad? We can’t know just yet.
I wrote before on how social media has broken down the shatter zones between cultures. These shatter zones gave societies the time and space needed to assimilate new ideas and technologies. Or reject them.
Around the world we are seeing pressures mounting on sociocultural systems. Populism, nationalism, economic models, especially in income inequality. The workplace as a result of the pandemic. Even how people are viewing their relationship with employers. A recent study in the Middle East showed that the majority of people actually think democracy is bad for economics. Chinas’ steady push to become an Orwellian dictatorship and using the soft power of social media to communicate its ideology with the world.
We can’t blame social media for this. Technology is always neutral. It’s how humans decide to use a technology that makes the difference. Because social media enable rapid and easy organising and communication to groups large and small, that over time, the pressures grow on many parts of our sociocultural systems.
We may see various incidences and actions at a local, regional or national level and sometimes international, but it’s much harder to see these impacts as they add up across the world. Culture is the means by which humans survive. It is the knowledge we use to live our lives. Ideation is a critical element of culture and we are sharing ideas unlike ever before.
While any accurate prediction of the future is impossible, we can make some inferences based on past historical events and our understanding of society and digital technologies. I think the one thing we can say with a degree of confidence is that enormous change in political, economic and social systems lies ahead of us. We should remember that every time humans have invented a revolutionary communications technology, massive conflict has followed. While I doubt civilizational collapse is in front of us, things are going to change at a global scale. This could take decades, perhaps a century.
