Archive for the ‘social capital’ tag
Computer-mediated social capital
As I’ve mentioned before on ANTIP, I’ve been very slowly reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The first section is dedicated to exploring trends in different arenas of civic and social engagement, and I’ve finally finished the chapter about online communities. Putnam makes several prescient points. When the book was published in 2000, he considered it much too early to generalize about the effects of the Web on social involvement. He is wary of both virtual evangelists and those who consider the Internet a force of social deterioration. The general trend to disengagement tracked in the book was in motion long before the personal computer came on the scene.
Putnam notes that the democratization of online communications permits anonymous, frank discussions and has the potential to get people talking beyond their own physical demographics, whether race, gender, age, or location. However, despite this potential diversity, Putnam noted that online communications tend to be more homogeneous in subject and values: folks who own French poodles can find one another and spend all their time online discussing that subject. (Siva Vaidhyanathan mentioned this in his talk on Googlization on Monday, the way that customization can lead us to sheltered views of the information out there.) Nonetheless, the ability for marginalized individuals to find a community online shouldn’t be underestimated.
Regarding political participation (such as sending an email to president@whitehouse.gov) Putnam questions whether we may find many ways to speak without really being listened to. That is, does the Internet give us the illusion of being more involved? Putnam points to several studies indicating that online communications may be better at reinforcing existing face-to-face relationships, rather than fostering longterm born-digital relationships. I seriously wonder how different this may be today, now that we’re a decade further into digital natives growing up in online communities. However, it certainly points to the success of sites like Facebook and Myspace, where individuals build virtual social networks from existing in-person networks.
The underlying message in this chapter stands strong, 9 years out: information alone is not enough to make community. I’ll post more when I get to the section about how online communities may be a tool for building up social capital. It’s bound to be interesting.
