The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication.
Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington's theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis that lib...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2015-01-01
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| Series: | PLoS ONE |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122543 |
| _version_ | 1819123108394565632 |
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| author | Bogdan State Patrick Park Ingmar Weber Michael Macy |
| author_facet | Bogdan State Patrick Park Ingmar Weber Michael Macy |
| author_sort | Bogdan State |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington's theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded that the axes of international geo-political conflicts had reverted to the ancient cultural divisions that had characterized most of human history. Until recently, however, the debate has had to rely more on polemics than empirical evidence. Moreover, Huntington made this prediction in 1993, before social media connected the world's population. Do digital communications attenuate or echo the cultural, religious, and ethnic "fault lines" posited by Huntington prior to the global diffusion of social media? We revisit Huntington's thesis using hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map the global alignment of interpersonal relations. Contrary to the supposedly borderless world of cyberspace, a bottom-up analysis confirms the persistence of the eight culturally differentiated civilizations posited by Huntington, with the divisions corresponding to differences in language, religion, economic development, and spatial distance. |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-22T07:03:06Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-a8c479830aa949b39d28e48f14997b80 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1932-6203 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-22T07:03:06Z |
| publishDate | 2015-01-01 |
| publisher | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
| record_format | Article |
| series | PLoS ONE |
| spelling | doaj.art-a8c479830aa949b39d28e48f14997b802022-12-21T18:34:45ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032015-01-01105e012254310.1371/journal.pone.0122543The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication.Bogdan StatePatrick ParkIngmar WeberMichael MacyConflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington's theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded that the axes of international geo-political conflicts had reverted to the ancient cultural divisions that had characterized most of human history. Until recently, however, the debate has had to rely more on polemics than empirical evidence. Moreover, Huntington made this prediction in 1993, before social media connected the world's population. Do digital communications attenuate or echo the cultural, religious, and ethnic "fault lines" posited by Huntington prior to the global diffusion of social media? We revisit Huntington's thesis using hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map the global alignment of interpersonal relations. Contrary to the supposedly borderless world of cyberspace, a bottom-up analysis confirms the persistence of the eight culturally differentiated civilizations posited by Huntington, with the divisions corresponding to differences in language, religion, economic development, and spatial distance.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122543 |
| spellingShingle | Bogdan State Patrick Park Ingmar Weber Michael Macy The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication. PLoS ONE |
| title | The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication. |
| title_full | The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication. |
| title_fullStr | The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication. |
| title_full_unstemmed | The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication. |
| title_short | The mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication. |
| title_sort | mesh of civilizations in the global network of digital communication |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122543 |
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