So, why are you so attached to capitalism?
He’s smiling when he asks the question, though he’s not joking. He asks, more or less, if I see myself married to Bourdieu in my framing of my dissertation project.
I know how to spell Bourdieu, and I have a longstanding casual acquaintance with the idea of cultural capital. Less so social capital.
I Google. “Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” – Bourdieu, 1983.
I shrug, equivocally. Dude has a point.
I use the term social capital – along with reputational capital, an idea I initially (ha!) thought I’d been genius enough to just conjure up as a description of my experience – to talk about what is exchanged in social media; in our blog interactions, our Tweets, our wiki contributions. The notion of this sociality as capital, and thus as capitalism, is a deeply embedded part of my concept of social media.
I suddenly want to explain to him that I’m NOT attached to capitalism, per se, but think it’s important to reflect the ways it shapes the online environment that my dissertation will argue shapes US.
Then I realize he gets that. That he’s having fun.
A thesis committee might as well be fun.
He notes that Bourdieu, to an extent, reduces social activity to an economic relationship. He mentions Marcel Mauss and the idea of gift economy. I nod, note that I’d started down the gift economy road in our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) research back in the fall. Started remains the operative word. Let’s face it: in both philosophy and social science, I am an academic hack, eternally on the learning curve. I suspect I will feel this way even if I die at the ripe old age of 103, having memorized the entire canon of Northrop Frye and Foucault, both.
I wonder if my preliminary writing has over-emphasized the capital aspects of an environment in which my own experiences have been largely, overwhelmingly non-monetary. For Mauss, it’s not like the gift economy precludes exchange or even the obligation of exchange: as I understand it in these early forays, it’s an honour system, but not a quid pro quo one. Customs govern the future benefits derived from actions, and both status and trade are part of the system. It sounds, to me, a lot like the blogosphere I knew back in 2006 and 2007, vestiges of which still beat at the heart of a great many of my online relationships.
And so I take it to the place where all my intellectual inquiries into the veracity of social media representations begin – to the crowd. A Twitterary Salon, of sorts: do you see social media as a gift economy or a social capital economy? In 140 characters or less.
***
Here, in highlights from five or six overlapping conversations, is the beginning of what I think is a great and unfolding debate on the nature of our communities and our interactions online.
@SaraHamil: My inner anthropologist just squee’d over you even asking that question. Also, I’d argue social capital.
@SaraHamil: I think we desire for social media to be gift, but in reality I feel the value of connections outweigh giving (not to sound negative)
@suefisher: A social capital exchange combined w/ the consumption/boasting of cultural capital. Status by affiliation & being in the know.
@Quadelle: Both. Some people/media will always fall higher on the gift spectrum, some on the social capital, but most will do some of both.
@SaraHamil: I totally agree about ye olde blogosphere being more gift culture though, for sure
@dougsymington: my vote is for ” social capital exchange” — particularly when more than one social media space involved in consideration
@Quadelle: gift = IVF online board. Everyone there to give (& receive) – mostly encouragement, but also ideas, info, stories, knowledge, etc.
@suefisher: Excellent point about discussion boards & their purpose. Yes, more like a gift economy there.
@dougsymington: was thinking one’s social media capital or “stock” rises (potentially) in proportion to number of “spaces” inhabited
@courosa: See there can be a problem of dilution, however.
@courosa: i think weight has to be unbundled from visibility – some correlation, but not necessarily positive.
@Quadelle: I think there’s three factors to consider: the individual (their motivation, which can change over time), the medium
@Quadelle: (some way more gift, others way more capital) & the network/community they form/join in them (peer influence).
@suefisher: In a certain respect, Wikipedia is the ultimate online gift economy.
@dougsymington: I see consistency of one’s conduct over time, and across spaces, most important factor when assessing social media resources
@AureliaCotta: I think the FB movie kind of answered that, no?
***
There you go. An informal, entirely unauthorized and entirely voluntary focus group of sorts, made up of people with a multitude of vested interests and histories online, some professional, some entirely personal, most a mix of both.
Apparently, I’m not alone in leaning toward the social capital idea, especially in the “matured” blog world of 2011. Apparently though, too, there are still ways to congregate online – wikis and discussion boards being the primary ones mentioned, though I think of a community like Glow in the Woods, and nod – wherein the interaction is still ostensibly and primarily less about reputation and potential capital gain, whether monetary or no, than about simple participation, or sharing, or contribution. And at the same time, social capital online is apparently no simple equation. I figured. Apparently, I need to think through how this matters, and what the distinctions mean.
Apparently, I need to see the Facebook movie.
Thanks, to all of you who threw your two cents in to the Twitter conversation. Everyone else, please consider it still open here: how do you see the economy of the online world in which you interact? In what ways do you experience it or perpetuate it along the principles of a gift economy?
And in what ways – even if not for money or love of money – are you attached to capitalism? Do you think I need Bourdieu?
my head is swimming and i am having visions of grad school running through my head! i’ve got to mull it over, maybe come back and comment or maybe just comment and observe and absorb.
funny how visions of grad school running in one’s head is just not the same as sugarplums. pity.
i guess throwing this out late on a Friday afternoon made for rather chewy weekend reading…still, reflection on whether people see their interactions – their connections, their comments, their retweets – as part of a cycle where friends are obliged to give gifts or where network contacts show interest, caring, knowledge in part to strengthen ties and build personal reputation? welcome.
…and i don’t see it as a binary, to be clear. i assume most of us are doing some of each, maybe. maybe something else.
but what?
This conversation is getting too B.S. for my taste. Why does academic language have to be so… academic? At a certain point you are just going to be communicating to others working on their doctorates, which is fine. It’s almost impossible to answer this question — gift economy? Social capitalism? I feel like you are forcing this conversation into some specific vision that you want to write about in a book. Isn’t there more room for the… personal. Maybe it would be useful if you gave us some history of your life online. How do you use social media? What has changed for you? When you chat on Twitter, what are you trying to do? I see you talking with all different types of people, from local Moms to nutty writers, to other academics. I’m sure you have different motivations with all of them. I’m sure your motivation for tweeting something to Roger Ebert is different than when you reply to me, no? I don’t see how social capitalism comes into play with us, unless you are saying that your main reason for using social media is to enhance your reputation. For who? For what purpose? I think a bit of that discussion would help me better understand the academic concepts.
Neil…it’s a theoryblog, meant to give me a place to work through theory. i try hard here to contextualize theory, to speak of it in ways that are as accessible as i can make it, and that’s good for me.
but the whole “why isn’t it simple?” stuff and the “you’re forcing the conversation into some specific vision you want to write about in a book” accusation…my friend, it’s called a dissertation. i HAVE to write one. and the gift economy concept – if you read the post – is one i’m grappling with b/c one of my advisors suggested it…and i wanted to know whether it rang true for others.
i prefer to do my thinking aloud, in conversation. that’s WHY this stuff isn’t on cribchronicles…so regular readers don’t feel obliged to slog through it. it’s an open invitation, and i’m grateful to anybody who wants to be IN the conversation. but this is here for me and for whomever wants to be a part of THIS learning community. i need to write my way through the theory. i appreciate input from ppl who use social media, theory or no – and the Twitter response to my question shows ppl have opinions – so i ask what you think b/c i value what you think. but yeh, the conversation is very much focused in terms of specific, academic theoretical concepts. b/c those are the frame in which i need to be able to understand social media. i’m crowdsourcing, checking the validity of my theory. but it’s still theory. b/c that’s what i do, right now.
the other posts – how i use social media, what’s changed for me, how i see social and reputational capital – they’re all written, there on the other blog last spring and summer mostly. check the tag “social media stuff”.
but Neil, this is not a narrative blog or a personal blog. this is me trying to host a public conversation about academic theory. and if you don’t want to read the wikipedia links and try to understand what social capital means, that’s totally cool. but the whole anti-intellectual line of “this stuff is impossible”?
that’s up to you. i love ya, Neil, but this blog is for people who find the idea interesting to consider. if you don’t, i won’t hold it against you. but don’t hold it against me that this is not written like the other blog.
OK, you win. You are right. I was being anti-intellectual. My apologies. I like reading your theory stuff. I need to think more about it. But I think you are on the correct path — I think it always has been working under a capitalist mode, where your stock rises and falls depending on all sorts of factors. Even the communities that are geared for helping others, usually have founders, who get social prestige for organizing the forum.
i get really worried that i simply won’t say the right (smart?) thing. i know! i need to get some confidence! but you do have me thinking and processing and mulling all of this over which is not a bad thing at all.
Christine, i worry about that every time i post.
and then Neil yells at me. :) but he doesn’t mean it.
some thoughts tho no answers (Hell, I’m the sort of sociologist who thinks it’s all about better questions, if that’s any help).
First I don’t think it’s and either/or. More like a both/and and what is then interesting is the conditions under which it is one or the other or when one morphs into the other or how even when we engage as a gift, we get social capital anyway which we can cash in later or not depending. (and maybe when and why we choose to capitalize on that capital).
Also, whether you like capitalism or not, it is the sea in which we swim and must therefore be part of our theorizing. Pretending it isn’t there doesn’t make it go away. But I like the way the “fun” question enabled you to articulate your thinking more clearly. A sign of good supervision there :-)
I have an urge to recommend Liz Stanley on Auto/biography. Not sure why. But I think maybe her work will help you in your quest to theorize, use your own experience, etc. And theory is her thing — sociological and feminist. Not really about internet (mostly because it was before, though maybe she’s written something more recently, not sure) but possibly good for thinking with.
Jo, agreed about capitalism being the sea in which we swim. there are huge corners of social media, especially in the areas with strong ties/roots in open source ethics, wherein that acknowledgement is fraught with all kinds of complexities and betrayals…but i think it’s still an important acknowledgement that doesn’t necessarily imply support or buy-in.
i’m hoping to trace capital (social, cultural, economic) and its relationships within the social networks that we use. i’m also interested in the occasions that arise wherein gift would be a better representation for interactions…but i wonder if even when we choose to operate in terms of gift exchange if we are still somehow free of capital?
guess i need to read more Mauss. or beg you for a sociological overview. :)
http://thebirdsisters.blogspot.com/2011/03/literary-citizenship-by-cathy-day.html
http://brevity.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/be-an-open-node-blake-butler-on-literary-citizenship/
Read these two articles/blog posts. they relate, i think. citizenship as outline in these articles–literary or cyborg–is reciprocal.
Christine, both those articles remind me how – for me – social media has flattened my sense of hierarchy and otherness, especially in regards to people whose work i admire. the idea of writing to an author would have made me quiver until recently…why, i would’ve wondered, would they want to hear from me?