Inter-Community Separatedness Trend in Hybrid and Virtual Environments. An Anticipatory Democracy Study on Community Modelling of Political Meaning Co-Creation

There is a rich research literature on meaning-making models covering various theories from social and political psychology to social semiotics. However, very few approaches address the impact of hybrid and virtual environments on meaning-making at both individual and community levels. The hybrid and virtual worlds offer a different social and political relational environment which has already influenced the societal fabric, the civic culture, and the inter-community relations. As a primary result, different forms and patterns of political participation and political culture have been identified, measured and analized. In this context, political meaning-making appears as a process which has been deeply influenced by the hybrid and virtual environments at both individual and community level. Global data and measurements of the impact of social networks, social media, and socializing networks on communities living in hybrid and virtual environments have proved an increasing degree of social cohesion at community level, enhanced collaboration and coordination, and emergence of new kind of social, political and economic processes covering everything from value co-creation to networked governance. However, the same global data and measurements appear to offer information about a quite opposite effect: an increasing inter-community separatedness trend. Analyses provided by international experts and scholars, organizations and institutions identify this trend as maintaining and (self)reinforcing when linked to political phenomenology like the populist, nationalist and extremist phenomena in societies and communities living in hybrid and virtual environments. The trend is not only associated with political phenomena and the political meaning-making in such context, but it could be also associated with the effect of inducing and, moreover, increasing community separation by fake news, manipulation of social and political preferences, (abuse of) emotional manipulation, radicall change in religiosity, diminished or loss of tolerance. This approach aims to answer the questions and explain political meaning co-creation in hybrid and virtual environments in which the socializing networks and social media induce a inter-community increasing separatedness trend. The approach employs global analytical data on social cohesion measurements which allow for an efficient and inspiring comparison with social separation trends at community level. The case studies and the global data available allowed for the construction of a global separation index (GSI). The separation index is further employed in the development of case studies about the role played by populism and nationalism phenomena in deepening the inter-community separation phenomena.