Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 9 – The most modern
form of communication, on-line social networks, are paradoxically re-enforcing
or even restoring some of the most ancient communities and identities among the
peoples of the North Caucasus because these networks allow those who have moved
from their native places to continue to live in them in the virtual world.
On the BigCaucasus.com portal this
week, Badma Byurchiyev explains this process and why individuals and groups who
move from their villages and towns into urban areas are less “incorporated” in the
latter than they were because now they can create their own communities online
(www.bigcaucasus.com/events/analysis/07-03-2013/82694-facebook_caucasus-0/).
While this process appears to be taking
place everywhere, Byurchiyev says, it applies with particular force to the
North Caucasus because of the nature of social relations that have existed
among the peoples of that region for centuries and particularly because of the
fear of their members of being excluded from the community of their birth.
Faced with accelerating social
change and the atomization of society that leads to ever greater isolation, he
argues, individuals “create their own context” and it is “not important whether
this is provided by an organization of people from the same region [zemlyachestvo]
or by friending on a social network.”
“If a zemlyachestvo by definition
presupposes a closed off space, then social networks at first glance create the
illusion of maximum openness.” But that is only an illusion, the journalist suggests,
because friending allows people to methodically create “a space of those who
think like them.”
Indeed, Byurchiyev continues, “the
longer you use a social network, the more tightly is defined the circle of your
communication and the more strongly is restricted the perspective of your
worldview.” That means “a return to the
chaos and infinite variety of the post-modern to the order characteristic of
so-called traditional society which existed up to the 19th century.”
“However strange it may seem,” he
says, this “isolation is an subconscious flight from loneliness” and represents
an striving after security, after the comfort that being among those whom we
understand and who understand us can provide in our encounters with “a hostile
world.”
And it is precisely here that one
finds “certain curious similarities between communities on the Internet and the
traditional mountain societies” of the North Caucasus, Byurchiyev suggests.
The isolated communities of that
region provided a sense of security to their members, he writes. Their spatial
isolation “from other social groupings” imposed a distinctive mark “on the
character and traditions of the mountaineers,” a fact that can be seen from the
fact that “under conditions of a closed society, to become an outcast was to
find oneself in absolute loneliness.”
Because of that danger, members of
these communities did everything they could to stress their membership in the
group both by maintaining its traditions and by accepting its values.
Those who use social networks do
much the same and for the same reason. They try to cut off for themselves in
the flood of information a place where they feel comfortable because they think
and feel like others who are in that same virtual place. And they do so because
they are afraid of being alone.
It may even be the case, Byurchiyev
continues, that this fear is greater among those turning to social networks now
than it was among their ancestors in the villages. That is because for the latter, this feeling was
sub-conscious but for the contemporary individual, it is a conscious and
primary matter.
And that in turn means that as the
individual continues to isolate himself from the broader community by relying
on his virtual one, he will find himself increasing alienated from the others and
increasingly concerned to maintain his ties with his online community. Such fears will drive him to rely on “the
largest and most static forms of social solidarity – nationalism, patriotism,
and religion.”
Put in simplest terms, this means
that the members of these online communities will become “’ever less urban’”
and cosmopolitan even if they are residents of a place designated as a city on
the map. That is particularly the case in post-Soviet Russia which has not
established “a culture of the urban milieu” or the institutions of civil
society.
Russia has in prospect two possible
paths of development. First, it may allow for “natural self-organization” of
social groups, something that will mean that “with time, the social networks
will create a milieu like that which existed in the Caucasus before the 19th
century” and lead to a situation where there will be “a multitude of isolated
communities.
If that occurs, Byurchiyev argues, there
will emerge a kind of “anarchy,” and one will be able to speak of the state
only “in quotation marks” because most people in the population won’t feel any need
for it and there will be enough “coordinating centers created according to
circumstance.”
Or second, the state in order to
justify its existence and maintain its privileges may initiative “an
urbanization from above,” not so much by some kind of Soviet-style industrialization
but rather by the planned introduction of a genuine and encompassing urban
milieu.
The rapid growth of social networks means,
Byurchiyev says, that the authorities will soon face “a fateful choice: either
they will create conditions for the establishment of civil society or the need
for it will fall away.” “To speak
metaphysically,” he adds, Russian society is presented with a dilemma: will it
be “the city or the mountains” that will define the future.
Those terms of course are
provisional but behind them stand some important values. The first involved “freedom
but also risks; the second, isolation but a feeling of security;” the first
presupposes hierarchy, the power of some over others while “the law of the
mountains is self-administration and equality.”
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