As part of of my MA in Creative Industries and Cultural Policy, I'm taking the module Social Media as Culture. We've been asked this week to think about the social media phenomenon of recent years and whether there is a correlation with this and social capital and if this is giving rise to social media capitalists, if it is, who are they?
Framing this approach to thinking about this question are a number of academic readings. Primarily Pierre Bourdieu's text Forms of Capital in the Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education edited by John G. Richardson, 1986, and an overview of how social capital has been understood across various disciplines written by Gordon Johnson & Jayne Percy-Smith, In Search of Social Capital; Policy & Politics, vol 31: num 3 321-34.
As Jon Hickman points out, most discussion of social capital relates to social policy, communities, institutions and so on, in offline, physical, albeit sometimes intangible, spaces and places.
What I am interested in here is the online space. Networks formed or forming around the fairly recently created online social media platforms as a part of the Web 2.0 revolution such as My Space, Facebook, Twitter and the proliferation of blogsites; personal sites and those with knowledge or business facing outlooks.
Bourdieu understands social capital to be “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to a durable network of more or less institution- alised relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition” (Bourdieu, 1997).
In turn, Johnson and Percysmith interpret this as individuals naturally gravitating towards others who share the same values, interests and norms and engage in these networks on the basis that it will bring to benefit to the wider network but crucially will bring benefit to themselves, at some stage in the future.
In my experience this is borne out in the online networks that individuals join and take part in. I choose those people who I feel I have something in common with, whether that is personal, I may know them in the 'real world', or people who I know and respect have recommended certain individuals or we share common interest pursuits, music for example. This last group takes more time to build and the individual invests more in these types of networks, as with any 'new' relationship there is an initial period of checking each other out and establishing the relationship.
In the above examples of my online networks, I can negotiate Bourdieu's social capital theory. For example I am on Twitter. I follow 400 plus people, half of which I haven't met but I have become a 'follower'. Why? Partly because it reflects on who I am, I follow people based on their interests and what they say but also because other people I know follow them and that gives them a certain cache. That becomes cyclical as others than follow me on what I say, their interests and those people they trust. But in this example, what do I get out of it? I don't care how many followers I have, unlike the cases of celebrities like Aston Kuthcher who made it a cause celebre to reach one million followers, and I don't have a strategy for any type of personal development in how I use Twitter. It serves a purpose in disseminating information, I recently used it heavily to promote a screening of my film so again I can see my power invested in my social capital (but did it result in more, or any of my followers attending the screening?) but other than that I now mainly use it to keep in 'the loop'.
So who are the social media capitalists? I wouldn't use my, admittedly flimsy, example above as evidence one way or the other but I believe the question is much more complex than first appears.
According to the dictionary definition a capitalist is 'a person who owns capital, esp when when invested for profit in business; a person who advocates capitalism as an economic system'
So who do we class as the capitalists here? For me this is a political question. While understanding Bourdieu and his theory of social capital, in this context those, and there are many, individuals who engage and could be considered leaders in social media, use the technological platforms owned by companies often either making, or looking to make, substantial profits. For me, these are the capitalists, working in and for, the capitalist ideology that dominates our economic systems around the globe. Facebook, Google, My Space, Wordpress, Twitter, Bebo et al and the users, and this term needs to be better researched, are actually the workers producing the capital that drives the profits for this companies. What is of interest here, and a topic worthy of further research (Jon Hickman?) is that not all of these workers get recompensed for the time they invest in these companies. It is inconceivable that someone would spend as much time, emotional and physical, in a factory or office, as they do on Facebook or Twitter and receive no financial recompense. And yet Facebook is now estimated to be worth $33.7 billion! I know me and my 400 friends won't be seeing any of that!
And while I can concede that there are some people who now derive money from their social media networks, this recompense rarely comes from the tech companies who build the platforms but from their work as freelance individuals or businesses within the field of social media, taking their chances alongside everyone else and as with traditional free market businesses some succeed and others fail.
I'll conclude this by stating much more research and debate needs to take place on this issue, but it is clear to me that the great proclamations made about the inclusivity and democratisation that web 2.0 and social media platforms bring, are really a smokescreen for the huge wealth individuals and organisations will make and continue to make in the capitalist system we continue to be controlled by.
Same old, same old!
I'm a member of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research in the School of Media at Birmingham City University: 