Quote:
Originally Posted by akv
Sig, do you feel mass popular culture/social media can change geopolitics, or merely increase the volatility or pace of geopolitical constants?
Take Egypt, at some point assuming basic needs are met, with twitter,social media etc. do these people eventually see themselves as something other than Egyptians on nationalistic lines? Or on the flip side, does popular culture and social media simply accelerate geopolitical constants, i.e. the conditions for revolution in Egypt were there, twitter etc. helped this come about in a single year as opposed to ten?
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AKV--
Your questions capture the essence of "the power of culture" debate among many sectors of the egg head community. This sprawling discussion has the tendency to fall into either/or categorization and my previous post contributed to that dynamic.
So if I may, I'd like to tweak my comment to say that mass popular culture can both amplify and refract ideas, and that the impact of mass popular culture is going to vary on a case by case basis. That is, there are no hard and fast rules.
In regards to the emerging debates over "new media"as a primary cause of revolutionary change in the Middle East and Africa, I suspect that the argument is being over done. For example, in Egypt, Mubarak was in power for thirty years. Are we to think that the locals were not debating what they should do before they started using Facebook? Second, as QP Pete points out, despite the hopeful expectations among Westerners for the rise of liberalism in Egypt, that country has other elements (e.g. the MB) trying to shape the outcome. So while social media may have contributed to the speed of change in Egypt, their contribution to defining that change remains undetermined.
However, even with this uncertainty, I still disagree with Kagan's preferred course of action. Global hegemony is to global leadership what paternalism is to genuine respect.