The global network society

Today's class was very reminiscent of last semester's globalization course - high paced development of social networking, off shore financing, limited government autonomy...
There were two points made in class that I disagreed with:
First, the idea that states have limited control over business and development because they must conform to international standards. Therefore, they must compromise their values in order to sustain their economy. The example given was the 35-hour work week in France. In order to keep up with the international community, France must compromise and work 42 hours a week. However, Israel has been successful in maintaining Saturday as its day of rest while the rest of the western world takes Sunday off. In other words, Israel has maintained its values even with pressure from the international business community. Therefore, I do not think all values are compromised when dealing with the global network. It's just a matter of how strongly one holds these values.
Another emphasis made in class was the phenomenon of networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It was said that if MySpace were a country, its 2 billion users would create the 5th largest country in the world! However, what kind of country would this be? Look at all the groups on Facebook - many of them are innocent but hundreds are factional such as "Israelis against Hamas" or "Help the Poor People of Gaza" or "Everyone who hates George Bush". It was said that these site users are often more loyal to their global networks than to their own country. This I find daunting and dangerous, not progressive and modern. In the virtual world, the lines between being politically correct and being inappropriate are blurred. The internet allows a sense of freedom without censorship, which has the potential to unleash some very extremist thoughts that up until now were tamed within the mind of the individual because there was no outlet for such thought. Social networking sites may very well be this outlet for public hate and factionalism. For this reason, my feelings towards the phenomona of public networking sites are mixed.