Are Social Media Strengthening or Loosening Bonds?

It is an oft-repeated platitude that social media brings people together; yet in many important ways, it pulls people apart. Since the earliest days of the Internet, techno-optimists have prophesied that digital communications would be a liberating force for mankind, bringing us together as never before, while cynics have predicted a world of artificial relationships and lonely, unfulfilled citizens. As the information age dream of the nineties has become the reality of the early 21st century, we have come to understand that the digital advances which are so radically changing our societies have heralded neither great disaster nor the first steps towards utopia. They have merely been engines of complex change.

Social media will not break down the barriers that separate people from each other – nor will any foreseeable digital communication technology. As technologist Howard Rheingold said of the Internet in 1993, “Every new communication technology […] brings people together in new ways and distances them in others. If we are to make good decisions as a society about a powerful new communication medium, we must not fail to look at the human element.”

The profound influence of social media on this ‘human element’ is why it is increasingly important in the context of integration. Social media is in many ways an empowering tool, particularly for new migrants, but the growing role it plays in our lives threatens some of the fundamental dynamics that bring individual citizens together within society – dynamics which sit at the heart of social cohesion. That social media might in some ways threaten particular social networks seems counterintuitive. In order to understand why, it is important first to consider why we bother to talk about integration in the first place.

Integration, between ethnicities, religious groups, or any other sections of society, is more important than the convenience of sharing a language, or equal access to services. It presents significant economic opportunities for individuals, as Mark Granovetter demonstrated in The Strength of Weak Ties, and for society as a whole, as Francis Fukuyama argues in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

Its social contributions are even more important, sitting at the heart of social cohesion. It is the mutual integration of citizens within society that binds society together. Nationally or locally, the mutual integration of citizens allow us to acknowledge mutual rights and come together effectively for collective aims, underpinning trust in our institutions and political representatives, and ultimately facilitating successful governance where otherwise it would be impossible. At its root, integration concerns all people within a society, because fundamentally it is what makes it work.

Integration concerns all people within a society, because fundamentally it is what makes it work.

The links that can bind societies together are numerous. Shared language, common culture, ethnicity, religion, political ideology and many factors besides can all form layers of social cohesion. Yet in most developed states, there is no longer – where there ever was – a homogenous ethnic or religious identity to place at the centre of social cohesion. Similarly, a shared political ideology cannot be the basis of social cohesion in a diverse, tolerant modern democracy, beyond the kind of ‘overlapping consensus’ regarding society’s basic principles that John Rawls envisages.

Liberal democracies require, above all, a civic identity which allows dissimilar people to come together as a single cohesive whole. A civic identity is based on something that all members of the state can share in: the local and national institutions that represent us, the services we use, common social norms, customs and laws, our formal obligations, like the welfare state, and our everyday social interactions.

Many of these core elements of civic identity depend on a common basis that increasingly seems rather archaic: territory. If our society is bound together by the value of our laws, our rights and responsibilities and our civil society, then it is dependent on the physical space that we inhabit, because it is dependent on the institutions of a modern state. We may not all share the same religion, ethnicity or beliefs, but we all obey a common law and common customs, and recognize certain responsibilities and freedoms, all defined and guaranteed by a shared territory.

Liberal democracies require, above all, a civic identity which allows dissimilar people to come together as a single cohesive whole.

All of this – the importance of shared values, physical proximity, territorial sovereignty – can appear dated. For a long time, political commentators and academics have been predicting, anticipating, or relishing the imminent death of the nation state at the hands of internationalism, the emerging ‘market state’, or the Internet. While a modern liberal democracy depends on geography, the increasingly sophisticated digital communications which underpin our globalized society seem to promise the death of geography, the end of physical space as an important factor in human interactions.

Relatively low-cost, instantaneous communications are now widely available. In Europe, around 75 per cent of the population have access to the Internet. Approximately 40 per cent have a presence on social media. This technological change is having a significant effect on the role of physical space in our everyday interactions. In a multitude of ways, social media can empower individuals across society. It can, for example, be used by governments or third sector organizations to increase political awareness and stimulate voter turnout. Indeed, the specific characteristics of social media make it a particularly useful means through which the hardest-to-reach communities – including recent migrants – can be politically mobilized, as demonstrated by our recent Demos project, Like, Share, Vote.

Social media is not only a medium through which to sell the establishment. Beppe Grillo’s Movimente 5 Stelle in Italy, initially born out of Beppe Grillo’s blog and local activist ‘meetups’ organised on meetup. com, presents an example of a powerful, diffuse networked movement that could not have emerged without social media.

Social media can be a particularly powerful tool for migrants. It provides greater access to information about the new communities that migrants find themselves in. Even more valuably, it provides informal peer-based networks of information, advice and support. This informal support can take the form of general social knowledge shared within an online community, or access to individuals with the knowledge that a new migrant needs, concerning labour markets, legal requirements or services that a migrant might not otherwise access.

In many cases, the situation becomes more complex than having an identity based on transnational social links. People can form online communities which, while not based on strong social bonds with a physical place, are based on a shared intra-group identification with it. Digital communities need not parallel offline social realities, and often a rigid distinction between online and offline communities can be misleading. These are just a few of the myriad ways in which social media can bring us together. How is it, then, that it can also pull us apart?

Social media facilitates the establishment and maintenance of social networks, certainly, but it also allows us to be selective in the formation of those bonds. It offers an easy alternative to the formation of bonds based on a new physical space; for example, a new community into which a migrant moves. Social media allows these bonds with friends and family to be maintained without reference to locality or nationality. Yet it is those bonds that follow geography, and therefore local communities and the institutions dependent on physical space, which form the social cohesion holding together the modern liberal state.

Social media improves access to social capital, and to the weak social ties that make migration easier.

Social media could be a barrier to integration, because it can provide migrants with a seductive alternative to forming new bonds within their new society. There is an ever greater ability to maintain a previous network of social links through web 2.0 without the need to form new ones. This is not to suggest that a person cannot have both international and national social links; rather, the pressure to form new links is reduced by the ease of access to old ones. Even when new social links are formed, the nature of social media interaction might encourage new migrants to take the path of least resistance – forming new social bonds that build on the existing social network that facilitated migration, rather than bonds that build on the wider social networks of the communities into which they migrate.

The dynamics of social media can passively reinforce this kind of social insularity, for example through the phenomena of the ‘filter bubble.’ The filter bubble, a coin termed by activist Eli Pariser, refers to the personalization of media consumption facilitated by social media algorithms and sophisticated digital technology. An algorithm – for example, the algorithm which determines what appears on your Facebook feed – makes selective calculations about the kind of content you are presented with, based on a range of factors; where you are, your search history, and what content you have previously like, shared, or viewed. If you engage with a certain type of content, or display certain characteristics, you will be presented with more of the same type of content, and less of any other type.

This personalization isolates you from opposing viewpoints and different experiences, while supplying a stream of views you agree with, and material you have previously enjoyed. In this manner, the filter bubble can create ideological, cultural and social silos. When sophisticated algorithms can surround users with opinions and media content that reinforces their beliefs, and when it is possible to be so selective in our social interactions, it is not difficult to see how social media might pose a challenge to social cohesion.

Social media could be a barrier to integration, because it can provide migrants with a seductive alternative to forming new bonds within their new society.

It is also clear why this problem might be particularly acute for new migrants, who have less access to the geographically-based social networks of other citizens that run along, and thus reinforce, the structure of society. Migrants have traditionally been described as being ‘absent twice’; cut off from their home countries, but facing challenges in integrating into their new communities. Social media certainly makes migrants less absent from home, but it is not clear that it makes them less absent from their new society.

As anthropologist Dr Lee Komito has pointed out, migrants have the opportunity to be, ‘virtual migrants’ rather than ‘connected migrants’; “their physical locality can be irrelevant for their identity, as they continue to participate in […] their home community, regardless of where they currently live”. The potential challenges posed by social media to the integration of new migrants acutely throw into sharp relief the challenges posed to social cohesion in wider society by a technology that so transforms the manner in which we associate. As we socialize more online and less offline, our norms and values are increasingly formed within networks of interest rather than of ‘prior acquaintance’, of shared opinion rather than necessary, open association. The filter bubble encourages this.

Moreover, the strength of the bonds within interest and opinion-based groups are increasing, while the bonds of nationality and shared culture are declining. Loneliness is also on the rise, with young people the loneliest of all and increasingly so. ‘More research is required’ is a common refrain, but in the case of social media’s influence on society as a whole, it is worrying how little enquiry has accompanied the seismic changes that have taken place. That brings us back to Howard Rheingold. If we want to make good decisions about technology and society, we cannot afford to neglect the human element.