Facebook Nation

Friday, 10 June 2011 08:55

Written by Neric Acosta

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, the youngest billionaire in the world today, found himself gussied up with a suit and tie, a get-up he claims he detests, to address the G8 Summit in Paris last month, the world was yet again served notice that information technology and the Internet now reign supreme, a driving force in fact of world affairs. Up to only a decade ago, global summits like the G-8, a gathering of the heads of state of the world’s most powerful economies, would still be dominated by the discourses on geopolitics and international finance or global trade.

But with the explosion of Facebook as the world’s turbo-charged online social networking phenomenon, with over half a billion members to date, the young man behind its resounding success has acquired indubitable G-8 gravitas. Zuckerburg’s life, after all, was the subject of an Oscar-nominated movie last year and named 2010’s Person of the Year by Time Magazine, both historic milestones by themselves. With the burgeoning population of ‘Facebookers’ in the millions every day, Facebook could well be a nation unto itself, third to China and India in size. And Zuckerburg would be its head of state.

So when the twenty-something youth spoke to the Group of 8 on May 25, 2011, Mark Zuckerburg was in effect in his own league. With characteristic insouciant flair, he held his own and chided his high-powered audience about how controls to the use of or content in the Internet, as proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France or incessantly tried by China or by the tottering regime of Hosni Mubarak when he faced the “Twitter-ing” youth of Egypt, was nothing short of foolhardy. “You cannot isolate some things you like in the Internet and control other things you don’t,” he thundered. The role of the Internet in the Arab Spring, he claimed, was trajectory-defining, setting the stage for a sea change in the stultifying milieus of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, among other societies in North Africa and the Middle East.

Anyone can cut the boyish billionaire more than a bit of slack and overlook some impudence on his part. As Time declared, Zuckerburg is the person who most changed the course of events over in 2010, creating a virtual hyper-connected community of denizens in all corners of the world – all communicating in real time across the vast, borderless universe of cyberspace.

Interpersonal spaces over time and (cyber) space have been reclaimed or discovered in practically every country where there is Internet access, establishing contacts in exponential terms across continents in the now ubiquitous referencing of “friending” – or “unfriending” – fellow Facebook denizens. But more than that, Facebook has revolutionized in ways undreamed of by anyone just a few years back the way we all relate to one another in the 21^st century – and the way we engage our leaders and institutions. As such, Facebook has allowed us to redefine, as the Arab Spring has shown or the 2008 election campaign in the United States of Barack Obama demonstrated, our own nascent, novel and even exuberant ways of understanding citizenship and democratic space.

In the Philippines this connectivity is likewise changing political landscapes and challenging age-old practices that have tied citizens to leaders in fettered patronage-based relations. Of the country’s Internet-connected population of over 40 million, over 90 percent have Facebook accounts. Coupled with the high ownership of mobile cellphones and with over 200 millions text messages sent out every day, this force field represents an entirely different configuration for the future of Philippine democracy. In the 2010 elections, then presidential candidate Noynoy Aquino amassed over two million friends in his Facebook accounts in a fortnight, moving the directions of a national campaign to a larger national movement.

Conscious or not, Zuckerburg’s force field of change via the instruments of Facebook and the Internet, is essentially about what author James Surowiecki calls the empowering “wisdom of the crowds.” His tome’s own title says it all: “Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies and Nations.” When we source ideas, insights, and innovations from as many individuals as we can and channel them towards a common goal, we tap into a limitless pool of ingenuity and brilliance that not one Einstein or several Nobel laureates could on their own ever replicate.

When this happens – whether in the fields of business, science, the arts, media, medicine or politics – the energies unleashed can literally take the world not by storm, as it were, but by tsunamis of creativity and action. In the words of author Malcolm Gladwell, these will engender more “tipping points” for human civilization as we know it. Individual thought and action converge with millions of others’ thought processes and actions. Jared Cohen of Google Ideas and Google Chair and CEO Eric Schmidt call these the power of connection technologies that will connect people to “vast amounts of information and to one another, and make the 21^st century all about surprises.”

The iconoclastic Zuckerburg – in the nerd-filled, jeans-wearing groves of Silicone Valley or in the rarefied halls of a G-8 summit – represents no less than a world, a generation, and a future of endlessly wild surprises.

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