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Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies 86 “Imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how fr eedom would spread.” George W. Bush, Phoenix, Arizona, December 1999. While it might seem odd to start a text on redefi ning cultural identities with a quote from a former US president, it nevertheless serves a purpose of highlighting one of the main misconceptions in discussions surrounding digital media and the Internet. It is oft en stated that the Internet has a signifi cant impact on cultural identities. Th is is certainly true to some extent but should not be left in this unidirectional form. Th is technological impact thesis, apart from simplifying the Internet, shows a fundamental disregard for social and cultural diff erences and the ways that the technology is being used or interpreted. Th e quote strongly displays a kind of dualism present in the discussions surrounding the history of new media research which some authors describe as a tension between technological and cultural determinism (Lister et al., 2009). Th e quote obviously falls into one category of technological determinism because it predicts that a complexly fragmented and hybrid technical medium such as the Internet will cause or have a direct impact on an even more multifaceted legal, political and social phenomenon such as freedom. Of course we could debate whether Bush was thinking about Chinese democracy or market freedom which would make US companies benefi t from it. Regardless of his intentions we know today that the Internet as a technical medium is spreading rapidly in China but the state has developed some of the most sophisticated censoring and monitoring mechanisms (technical and social) in eff orts to control it. Th e Chinese case clearly points to a complex interconnection between pre-existing social structures, cultural conceptions and technological capabilities and potentials. Th is interconnection between the social, cultural and technological has in recent years been further emphasized by the infl uences and the rise of the so-called social media which bring social and cultural aspects to the fore. Th ese new types of social media are Web 2.01 websites which facilitate, enable and possess the potential for social action, interaction, communication and identity formation in cyberspace (Bruns and Bahnisch, 2009: 7) as well as supplementing and infl uencing offl ine social and cultural processes. Among global leaders are such websites as Facebook, YouTube or Wikipedia. Th ey are, however, not entirely new, since they are part of a long-term process of socializing cyberspace and populating it with human communication in a process which can be tracked down to early virtual and online communities. 2 What is 1 For the lack of a better term we use the term Web 2.0. However, it should be said that its origin lies in marketing strategies attempting to revitalize the US economy aft er the Wall Street dotcom bubble crash in 2000 and 2001. Th e new and restructured web companies started using more fl exible business models in attracting audiences and users to their platforms. Th e term was originally formulated by media expert and marketing consultant Tim O´Reilly. For more details see O´Reilly, 2005. 2 For an outline of the early development of virtual communities see Rheingold, 2000.
How social media enforce glocalization - the processes of identity change in selected ... new then about new social media? Th ey are mostly free of charge, easy to use and access, web based, spread across unprecedented numbers of global populations and technically more developed since they enable the manipulation of text, images and videos. Th ey are currently dominating the usage of World Wide Web in almost all countries around the world. Since these processes involving Web 2.0 social media are new and still not part of substantial social and cultural research we will attempt to describe the main processes and mechanisms that can and do infl uence the reshuffl ing of cultural identities3 in a process of glocalization in Central and Southeast European countries. We understand glocalization as the main process of cultural change in the process of globalization. Robertson defi nes it not as a polarity but as a complex relationship between the global and the local (1995: 35). 4 Th e argumentation in the article is mostly theoretical and conceptual. Th e fi rst section deals with globalization in general and the spread of communication structures in particular which infl uence the processes of shaping and reshaping cultures. In the next section we describe how media communication types in contemporary network societies are being fundamentally changed. In the ensuing section we discuss how the notions of media space have evolved from hyperreality to virtual reality to digital space. In the following section we describe how Facebook as a technological context enables communication and cultural identity reshaping. Finally we discuss the ways of reshuffl ing national culture through the example of Wikipedia. Riding the globalization tide Th e main characteristics of globalization are far-reaching changes of nation states and national societies. Beck describes globalization as a process in which transnational actors increasingly interconnect and infl uence the reduction of power of nation states and undermine their infl uence. Globalization produces diff erent, more or less autonomous logics: economic, cultural, ecological, political, and so forth (Beck, 2003: 28). However, the main characteristic of all these processes is that they change the spatial and temporal coordinates of social relations. Giddens describes globalization through a “disembedding mechanism” of lift ing out the social relations from their local interaction contexts and their restructuring inside an unspecifi ed time-space expansion (1990: 21). What Giddens means by space is, however, rather vague. Is it transborder space of interconnected national territories or is it perhaps media space in a media broadcasting or network paradigm? What infl uences most the disembedding of 3 We understand cultural identity as being formed and reshaped through processes of discursive exchange of values and symbols in the process of interaction and communication. 4 “Th e global is not in and of itself counterposed to the local. Rather, what is oft en referred to as the local is essentially included within the global. In this respect globalization, defi ned in its most general sense as the compression of the world as a whole, involves the linking of localities” (Robertson, 1995: 35). 87
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