In the age of digitalization, the space the world
encloses is expanding its volume to infinity within the cyberspace as the new
technologies, particularly recent improvements in the internet emerge to
provide an effective social platform and the virtual world inside our computers become more and more widespread
taking place in the lives of men as social-beings. It is shown by many research
that social media is being used by not only antisocial people in real life but
also the most social people who wants to share more with each other and expand
their networks via new media. As it will be explained below: virtual worlds trigger the evolution of
concepts like social mobilization, participation and socialization, on the
basis of two main reasons: firstly, virtual
world helps socialization and social mobilization because its extent of
sociability is wider than it is in the real world and secondly, social media
heralds a new form of politics, transforming various political concepts such as
revolution and the acts of civil society.
Today, men as social-beings live both in the real and
the virtual worlds. Besides of being educated, or purchasing/selling things,
the reason people choose to get into those virtual worlds is mostly to play a
MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game). Virtual worlds within
MMORPGs are different from single player computer games in terms of many
aspects: Virtual worlds have dynamic environments where actions of the
cross-continental users can permanently shape. In other words, there is a
multinational society in virtual worlds, most of which are open ended, editable
environments, with a single goal which is to facilitate interaction between the
users and granting them to express themselves. Moreover, in some virtual worlds
such as World of Warcraft (WoW) players are encouraged to form groups and
guilds in order to fulfill certain tasks. Eventually, players keep forming
groups not only for specific reasons projected by the creators of the game, but
also to force the features of the platform and to change the regular order in
the game. The case in the virtual world Everquest, created by Sony Online
Entertainment is a good example where one day, users stop battling each other
and start to communicate about their biggest problem in the game. As a result
nearly 200 of them come together at the same time to kill the unbeatable
monster Kerafyrm. The battle lasted four hours and when the unkillable monster
got very near to be beaten, the programmers of the game had to make a decision.
Therefore the creators felt themselves forced to reset the game, and this
God-like act was the result of an impressive communication, cooperation and
coordination of the users. It is obvious that it would be harder to bring 200
people from different countries and continents together for a common reason. In
the absence of a higher governing institution and social regulations in virtual
worlds cooperation among the people is at its utmost.
From a social perspective, a new form of politics is
being formed as people started to share their ideas using the new social media,
known as Web 2.0. The key political concepts started to change or expand
meanings. The concept of revolution, for example, had gained a new, even
"revolutionary" meaning with the use of social media efficiently as a
social organization tool. Arab Spring has shown that social media could be more
efficient than political parties, institutions and NGOs; especially in
countries where are devoid of active political participation and
civil society. The revolutions in the Arabian countries: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya,
Syria is a very good example to determine the fact that people started using
digital media as their new platform for mass communication. For the revolutions
that took place in those countries were all organized by the social media.
“Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone technology inter alia allowed for extensive
political expression against government corruption both on- and offline. Calls
for socio-political transformation heard on the streets of Tunis and Cairo were
echoed around the globe, gaining much sympathetic support internationally.”[1]
Therefore, virtual world sets new standards and a new perspective in studies
pertaining to social political structures.
In the light of what argued above, it can be said that
the technological improvement, regarding the results of the internet’s
functions is continuing at an incredible rate. Regarding to these developments,
it creates a better environment in terms of sociability and the concrete results
of this phenomenon would be observed increasingly in both the virtual worlds
and the real world.
[1] Bohler-Muller Narnia; van der Merwe Char. “The potential of social
media to influence
socio-political change on the African
Continent”.Policybrief No. 46, March 2011, pp.1
