The Cultural Implications of Social Media

There’ve been enough cases of how in some fragile nations in the Global South, Social Media tools have been used to rally protestors for democracy – Iran, Ukraine, Belarus to name a few. But now in Pakistan, Facebook is facing a national ban. Not for reasons of it’s own doing, but because someone posted a page looking for cartoons of Muhammad.

Now even those who would’ve previously been against a ban of a service like Facebook are, for religious and religio-cultural purposes, supporting the ban. This suddenly poses a series of questions and issues;

• One person can post something on a social network (i.e. Facebook) that throws an entire country into overdrive to call for a national ban.
• That some of these new mediums are beginning to have broader socio-political and socio-cultural impacts that can extend beyond a national border to have broader impacts on international relations.
• These technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive and are not the sole domain of the Global North and are a key tool to the Global South.
• Cultures and religious beliefs face challenges they’ve never before known. For a culture is the combination of values, beliefs and more and religion is ideology and theology. These are all, at their heart, ideas, concepts, beliefs – all areas that can be challenged, manipulated, changed, adapted, developed and more through Social Media tools (blogs, Facebook etc.)

What I think we’ll see in the coming years is increasingly fragmented social network services. Already there are cultural, religious and ethnic social networking services (i.e. Bigadda or BlackPlanet or MyChurch.) In business terms, for Facebook this will be their biggest challenge; dealing with culture, religion and belief-systems, and the competitors that serve those interests.

In thinking of the U.S., Canadian and Western European markets, that may not mean much. But when you get into countries in the Global South, that will mean a lot. Facebook, like Google or Microsoft, is seen as part of America and the West as a whole and thus the American/Western cultural system.

Yes, Social Media Technologies as a whole are helping, very positively, to grow a more integrated global community, but there will still be divides. And that will mean walls and some interesting political and economic implications over the next 10-15 years.