a useful inquiry

On Jon Husband's Wirearchy:

... an interesting and matter-of-fact article titled The Power Of Us in Business Week, stating in no uncertain terms that the use of interpersonal communications on the Web, in interlinked interconnected environments, is having significant impact on business logic, organizational structures and the power relationships between established and more traditional organizations and their constituents.

Just as some individual bloggers have become mini self-promotional industries, so too the blogosphere as a whole seems to do nothing better than come up with ever new and astounding ways to take credit for the most amazing transformational developments.

But here's something -- a task, if you will -- for some sociopolitical mythologist to study: What evidence is there that the use of interpersonal communications on the Web, in interlinked interconnected environments is having any effect on the glurgian mystifications of nationhood*?

That is, is it possible to study the blogosphere and say with any degree of certainty that (a) the mythos of nationhood is undergoing serious critique leading to a new sense of human order and systems, (b) the activity of global interconnected environments is exaggerating and deepening traditional notions of national identity, or (c) the group intelligence of the blogosphere is having no impact on the matter whatsoever?

One might argue that group intelligence cannot exist without some reduction in the aura of nationality. After all, one definition of intelligence has to do with reducing the number of unexamined lies in which the mind is suspended. Given the exemplary intelligence cited by Business Week, however, it might be hard to say:

The Internet's supreme group-forming capability suggests the rise of an almost spooky group intelligence. Within minutes of Pope John Paul II's death, hundreds of eBay sellers had posted related products for sale.

...

*E.g.: "Lo stato, cosi come il fascismo lo concepisce e l'attua, e un fatto spirituale e morale, poiche concreta l'organizzazione politica, giuridica, economica della nazione; e tale organizzazione e, nel suo sorgere e nel suo sviluppo, una manifestazione dello spirito." Mussolini, March 10, 1929, speaking at the Teatro reale dell'opera in Rome.

[trans. As Fascism conceives and realizes it, the State is a spiritual and moral fact, because it concretizes the political, judicial and economic order of the nation; and such organization, in its rise and in its development, is a manifestation of the spirit.]