Session 20 - The importance of facebook in politics

A simply written but interesting essay by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Robert O. Keohane, "Transnational Relations and World Politics" talks about transnational actions as well as how these actions can lead to an impact, scale of impact and consequences.

Looking at history we can see several impacts of transnational activities. In the early 1990's when multinational companies started to expand to Latin American countries, some of them gained quite an extremely powerful grasp on the government to force them to do as they pleased which meant changing of policies quite radically to please the multinational companies (fine this may be an exaggeration but its true to an extent)

In today's extremely globalized world with several technological advancements such as in the internet allows citizens from one country to communicate easily with another. For example a student who travels to a foreign country for studies, can communicate with people from any country through face book or phone or one of the other mediums any time he/she wants to. This can lead to a change in ideas and preferences as talked about by the authors.

A recent example of an incident caused by transnational interaction can be what happened a few months ago in the Gulf States where there was a movement by the citizens to overthrow the king/dictator. All this can be said to come about simply from transnational interaction between citizens of different states.

And so tools such as Facebook are slowly becoming tools that play a part in politics since they make communication easier and quicker.