One of my favorite things about being in school is learning names for concepts that I am interested in but don’t fully grasp. “Social capital” is the most recent of such terms, with my foray into literature about social capital beginning over a week ago as I read for my HCDE 501 class (Theoretical Foundations of Human-Centered Design & Engineering). While class discussion was illuminating in its own right, it was the articles that were shared by my peers after class that truly piqued my interest. The most interesting of such articles was “Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?: Facebook Use and College Students’ Life Satisfaction, Trust and Participation,” which was written by Sebastian Valenzuela, Namsu Park and Kerk F. Kee and appeared in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 2009.
The first thing that caught my attention in the article was the quality and quantity of scholarly literature incorporated in the first few sections. The authors cover a significant number of theories and studies about social interaction, civic participation, online participation and psychology, all of which together create an intensely rich beginning to the article. Furthermore, the study that Valenzuela, Park and Kee carry out is also quite fascinating, but much too detailed to explain here.
While I have not summarized the entire article, I have posted a few excerpts below that I found particularly relevant to my experiences online and would strongly encourage anyone interested to give the article a read.
Excerpts
It is important to study the relationship between using a social networking site and developing attitudes and behaviors that promote social capital and democratic citizenship. Social trust facilitates associative behavior, fosters a strong civil society, and Makes political institutions and officials more responsive, all of which translate into a more effective democracy (Putnam, R.D. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community).
By using social networking sites, individuals seek to maintain and increase their social networks because engagement in these networks enables individuals to develop norms of trust and reciprocity (877).
“Individuals’ life satisfaction is determined, in part, by their social ties” (877).
These ideas run parallel to my personal belief that humans are social animals, and that social interaction, in multiple and often redundant arenas, helps to create healthier, happier communities. By engaging with others (regardless of medium or tool) we are building and strengthening connections that ultimate create reservoirs of community for us to draw from later. Humans have survived as long as they have because of collective action, and social media and SNSs are allowing us to extend our interpersonal engagement across the world.
“The development of SNSs dedicated to fostering civic and political engagement among users, particularly young people, speaks in a loud voice to the potentialities of social media as a tool for collective action… SNSs do not need to succeed at mobilizing users offline to represent a unique contribution to people’s engagement” (879).
This idea speaks largely in favor of the opposition to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent critique of the weak-ties that SNSs and social media interaction create. In this article, the authors acknowledge the difference between bridging, weak-tie social capital and bonding, strong-tie social capital, though they seem to make claims that generally fall in line with my own beliefs about the power of social media and SNSs to cultivate social capital and engage users in action.
Note: Thanks to Betsy’s group for finding the article.
Cool article! I’ve been thinking about social capital recently as well, so it was especially fun to read. Would you distinguish the terms “social capital” and “social power” – and if so, how?
While I don’t think the two terms are really synonymous, I do think social capital is absolutely power-related: both in the sense of gaining access to power via “networking” and in the broader sense of shared interests and “engagement.”
Anyways, I bring up the concept of power in order to get to another of its meanings, that old Physics 101 chestnut: the equation Work = Power * Time. The physics meaning spills over into the social meaning, I think, so that one way of measuring social power is simply to look at exactly what it accomplishes: its resulting Work, as it were.
In that sense, the sheer utility of facebook (and Twitter, FourSquare, etc.) more than justify their value as social capital: they are useful (they result in social Work/interaction), so the “spending” of social capital is measurably present, just as power is present any time work can be measured.
Oops, forgot to add that in this case we have at least one clear-cut example of Work: “The development of SNSs dedicated to fostering civic and political engagement among users, particularly young people… a tool for collective action.”
And I particularly like the authors’ idea that “offline” community-building, while a benefit of SNSs, is not their only measurable product. The article raises interesting questions of how social capital can be “measured” – or, to borrow my earlier conceit, how social capital can be evaluated in terms of Power in the absence of the Work term of the equation.
Great find, mate! I’m no expert, but you might dig some of the more useful things I’ve found while trying to sort through (like everybody) what the heck Facebook and Twitter _mean_…
http://www.socialcapitalgateway.org/NV-eng-against.htm (and really, the whole Social Capital Gateway)
http://www.infed.org/biblio/friendship.htm
http://www.thoughtcrumbs.com/publications/burke_chi2010_sns_and_wellbeing.pdf
That last paper also had a set of (beautiful) slides which might come in handy if you’d prefer a summary. I’ll email them if you poke me.