New Traditionalist | Ian Thomas

Pic­ture: Geoff Sowery

The polit­ical effect — as well as the effect upon brands — of social­ised media has been a source of con­stant fas­cin­a­tion for me over the course of the past 18 months. I’ve pasted below an excerpt from a post I pub­lished last July that alluded to the topic.

The post’s con­tent is rel­ev­ant because, today, Google has delivered an abso­lute blinder of a case study, the con­sequences of which may be pored over by gen­er­a­tions to come.

By declar­ing that it will no longer censor search res­ults Google (a ‘vir­tual’ state) and China (a ‘nation’ state) are at log­ger­heads over ter­rit­orial encroachment.

If you read Google’s state­ment, just note its tone.

This isn’t a brand speak­ing; it’s a supra-national organ­isa­tion that is lever­aging its power to make a dip­lo­matic point by rap­ping the civil liberty and polit­ical con­duct knuckles of a global mil­it­ary and eco­nomic superpower.

Des­pite the fact that Google is dwarfed by the per­ceived scale and power of the Chinese state, that doesn’t pre­vent it from trying out its devel­op­ing dip­lo­matic muscles, and nor does it lessen its chances of bring­ing its dip­lo­matic influ­ence to bear. (After all, the United King­dom has been dis­pro­por­tion­ately influ­en­tial in global dip­lomacy for gen­er­a­tions des­pite it being a small island without an empire as per­vas­ive as Google’s.)

That’s the point I made in my ori­ginal post excerpt; and that’s the the sig­ni­fic­ance of Google’s move today. ‘States’ are ‘ima­gined com­munit­ies’ with pop­u­la­tions. In China’s case, it’s inhab­it­ants of a phys­ical area; in Google’s its users — and not ‘consumers’ — in an ima­gined space. What’s more, Google’s pop­u­la­tion of users is likely to be con­sid­er­ably higher than China’s.

Nat­ur­ally, Google will bene­fit from the back­ing of world gov­ern­ments over its stance, but it won’t be rep­res­en­ted by them.

That is because Google’s cur­rency is real­is­able know­ledge which tran­scends national bound­ar­ies in a way that phys­ical branded products simply cannot. So, while Google may have been foun­ded in the United States, its cul­tural roots and pop­u­la­tion is world­wide. If Coca Cola made a sim­ilar stand, it just wouldn’t muster a frac­tion of the global gasp that Google’s announce­ment has caused.

Here’s what I wrote back in July:

What’s really going on: The new socialism

What’s really hap­pen­ing, though, is fas­cin­at­ing and takes me back to one of the few books I read at uni­ver­sity which struck me as interesting.

It was called ‘Ima­gined Com­munit­ies’ by a guy called Bene­dict Ander­son. It was about polit­ical nation­al­ism, but his thesis still stands today  –  in fact, it’s prob­ably more per­tin­ent  –  because he sug­ges­ted that the media (print) had been the primary dynamic enabling the concept of ‘nations’ to thrive. It fol­lows that, if the media becomes frag­men­ted but easily access­ible to most people, then there’s a cor­res­pond­ing frag­ment­a­tion and pro­lif­er­a­tion of ‘ima­gined communities’.

It’s why nations like China are para­noid about the power of Google to spread ideas that have the poten­tial to create dis­son­ance between compli­ance to the state and pur­suit of per­sonal ambi­tion  –  Uighurs/Han Chinese unrest may be an early indic­a­tion of this.

It’s also why sects do weird things  –  because their ima­gined com­munity tran­scends the con­sen­sual ima­gined com­munity of most of the people around them.

Your ima­gined com­munity shifts and changes through­out the day, depend­ing on con­text. So you might be part of a work-based com­munity right now, or a member of a pro­fes­sion this after­noon, a com­muter at the end of the day, an actor in ama­teur theatre tonight, a father, a sister or brother or friend. If you’re in the UK, its unlikely that you’ll be Eng­lish or Brit­ish, unless events take a remark able turn, but you may well be a towny, vil­la­ger or seasider.

So what’s hap­pen­ing has been described by Kevin Kelly at Wired as a ‘new social­ism’; tech­no­logy is enabling people to real­ise the poten­tial of social con­nec­tions, of whichever hue, for all sorts of dif­fer­ent reas­ons and outcomes.

So we’re living through an ism, but it’s not ideo­lo­gical; it’s sociological.

And I think it’s bril­liant because the desire to apply rational seg­ment­a­tion models to deeply unpre­dict­able human beings is being chal­lenged by the diversity and access­ib­il­ity of media.

Here’s the ori­ginal post (you”ll need to scroll down to see where the excerpt featured)