43 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. This leads to a sense of belonging, more trust and solidarity among each other.
      • for: community group - building social capital, recommunitifying the community, recommunitify the community

      new portmanteau: recommunitify - means to put community back in the world community, to build social capital in a community that is lacking it

  2. Nov 2023
  3. Sep 2022
  4. Aug 2021
  5. May 2021
  6. Mar 2021
    1. Bartscher, A. K., Seitz, S., Siegloch, S., Slotwinski, M., & Wehrhöfer, N. (2020). Social Capital and the Spread of COVID-19: Insights from European Countries. IZA Discussion Paper, 13310. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13310/

    1. So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement.

      This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

  7. Feb 2021
  8. Oct 2020
    1. The individual is helpless socially, if left by himself. Even the association of the members of one's own family fails to satisfied that desire which every normal individual has of being with his fellows, of being a part of a larger group than the family. If he comes into contact with his neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient for the substantial improvement of life in the whole community. The community as a whole will benefit by the cooperation of all its parts, while the individual will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors. First, then, there must be an accumulation of community social capital. Such accumulation may be effected by means of public entertainments, picnics, and a variety of other community gatherings. When the people of a given community have become acquainted with one another and have formed a habit of coming together occasionally for entertainment, social intercourse, and personal enjoyment, then by skillful leadership this social capital may easily be directed towards the general improvement of the community well-being.
    1. Think of this essay as a series of strongly held hypotheses; without access to the types of data which i’m not even sure exists, it’s difficult to be definitive. As ever, my wise readers will add or push back as they always do.

      Push back, sure, but where? Where would we find this push back? The comments section only has a few tidbits. Perhaps the rest is on Twitter, Facebook, or some other social silo where the conversation is fraught-fully fragmented. Your own social capital is thus spread out and not easily compiled or compounded. As a result I wonder who may or may not have read this piece...

    2. The same way many social networks track keystone metrics like time to X followers, they should track the ROI on posts for new users. It's likely a leading metric that governs retention or churn. It’s useful as an investor, or even as a curious onlooker to test a social networks by posting varied content from test accounts to gauge the efficiency and fairness of the distribution algorithm.
    3. Social capital is, in many ways, a leading indicator of financial capital, and so its nature bears greater scrutiny. Not only is it good investment or business practice, but analyzing social capital dynamics can help to explain all sorts of online behavior that would otherwise seem irrational.
    1. Mutual aid societies were built on the razed foundations of the old  guilds, and cooperatives and mass political parties then drew on the  experience of the mutual aid societies."

      This reminds me of the beginning of the Civil Rights movement that grew out of the civic glue that arose out of prior work relating to rape cases several years prior.

      I recall Zeynep Tufekci writing a bit about some of these tangential ideas in some of her social network writing. (Where's the link to that?)

  9. Aug 2020
  10. Apr 2020
    1. Johnson’s book (lively and well sourced –  highly recommended) transcends the cliche of the individual innovator  and shows the ways in which innovation depends on a form of social  capital — the networks of people and ideas that innovators learn from  and build upon.

      It's rarely ever about the "lone genius".

  11. Apr 2019
    1. That so much social capital for the young comes in the form of followers, likes, and comments from peers and strangers shouldn't lessen its value.
    2. Maintenance of existing social capital stores is often a more efficient use of time than fighting to earn more on a new social network given the ease of just earning interest on your sizeable status reserves. That's just math, especially once you factor in loss aversion.
    3. Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

      This presumes that status is the only reason why people would join such a network. It also underlines the fact that the platform needs to be easy and simple to use, otherwise no one enters it and uses it as the tool first before the network exists.

    4. graph-based social capital allocation mechanisms can suffer from runaway winner-take-all effects. In essence, some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game.
    5. I can still remember posting the same photos to Flickr and Instagram for a while and seeing how quickly the latter passed the former in feedback. If I were an investor or even an employee, I might have something like a representative basket of content that I'd post from various test accounts on different social media networks just to track social capital interest rates and liquidity among the various services.
    6. It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning. Everyone has more of an understanding of how the game works so the competition is stiffer.

      Perhaps the IndieWeb is growing at such a much slower rate (in this thesis, there is a much higher level for "proof of work") that this sort of social capital is more akin to that of social capital in real life? Some of the value of IndieWeb is that all your "social capital" can be put in one place and better controlled by you.

      Why would one want to game their own sites in these ways? Are personal sites a better reflection of real life social capital? There's also lost personal time in learning and participating in dozens of social silos which is much better spent creating things of greater consequence.

      With respect to his mention of Paul Krugman's Instagram account, it's useful to be able to pick and choose what you might want to follow in Paul's life. If you're a close friend then his Instagram account is awesome, but if you're a young political science student then his bookmarks, reads, notes, and articles would be much more valuable to you.

    7. [An aside about exogenous social capital: you might complain that your tweets are more interesting and grammatical than those of, say, Donald Trump (you're probably right!). Or that your photos are better composed and more interesting at a deep level of photographic craft than those of Kim Kardashian. The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms. Generalized fame is one of them. More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily: you might follow Paul Krugman on Twitter, for example, but not have any interest in his Instagram account. I don't know if he has one, but I probably wouldn't follow it if he did, sorry Paul, it’s nothing personal.]

      In publishing circles, this has long been known as platform or author platform--ie that thing that made you famous in the first place that gives you the space to attempt to try to use that fame to sell books.

    8. While you can outsource Bitcoin mining to a computer, people still mine for social capital on social networks largely through their own blood, sweat, and tears.

      The other portion of the problem is then turning this social capital into actual money. This gives way to the rise of influencers.

    9. The creation of a successful status game is so mysterious that it often smacks of alchemy. For that reason, entrepreneurs who succeed in this space are thought of us a sort of shaman, perhaps because most investors are middle-aged white men who are already so high status they haven't the first idea why people would seek virtual status
  12. Mar 2019
    1. Understanding Monetary Premiums in Programmable Value Networks

      The TLDR is: Zuller proposes that social capital and financial capital form a virtuous circle for cryptonetworks, allowing first movers such as ethereum to gain a decisive advantage against competitors. Ethereum's accumulated social and financial capital make it difficult for a challenger to emerge as a general-purpose decentralised smart contract platform.

      My thought is Zuller's analysis of social capital ignores the long established body of work on on the topic, and this analysis could be better applied in the case of ethereum. I also think bitcoin is an interesting study in the effects of social capital and the viability of a decentral crypto network.

    2. DFINITY, Near, Polkadot

      These projects are all funded or founded by individuals with significant social and financial capital. They are therefore well positioned to challenge ethereum's dominance.

      By contrast, consider Satoshi Nakamoto's launch of the bitcoin network. As a pseudonymous persona with no history attached to it, Nakamoto had no social capital to speak of. This social capital had to be bootstrapped through a corpus of communications on the cryptography mailing list, and other fora.

      So bitcoin was launched with minimal social capital, by contrast to ethereum.

  13. Nov 2018
    1. ​BUT, our students will not (most) have the economic, cultural, historical provenances nor intention ... the reality of community college students is that most will not produce academic discourse but will eak through multiple courses with minimum academic writing (and if so, poorly) while they will continue their certain continued marginalized communities that are, per Bourdieu, decapitalized (lacking cultural capital)​, whereas critical rhetoric could address these systemics inegalitarianism.

  14. Sep 2017
    1. , it would, but because their networks do not often cross, the gap between social connectedness of the rich and the poor continues to grow

      Yes! This is the cost of geographical, educational and social marginalization. Different economic groups travel in different circles which reproduces their current economic position.

    2. social capital offline only helps those who currently have high levels of economic and symbolic capital.

      Again, I think the theoretical point behind social capital is that all relationships can have some value but it is also to show how some connections have more value than others. Certainly, knowing your neighbor or sharing stories with the clerk at the 7-11 is helpful to those how live in poverty. But, for those who are born at the top, they know the head of the corporations so the pay off is bigger. Both pay off but one pays off more.

    3. social ties, is a significant reason. His children, by no virtue of their own but solely because of their social ties with him, are also in positions of high power and prestige and have astronomical amounts of money.

      I am not sure this is the best example of social capital in that these are family relationships not social relationships. I think the idea of social capital is to show that other relationships beyond family or blood have value.

    1. remote connections comprise a social network that offers a degree of social capital without some of the demands that go along with social networks in closer quarters.

      What are the benefits of this? In terms of cost/benefit, if these ties pay off just as well as in person ties without the expending of as much time and labor, is that a net positive? Or is something lost in the ease of contact? Again, what does data say?

    1. encourage students to activate their ties

      Are these students building social capital? Do these ties follow them outside the class? Do they draw on these ties for other purposes?

    1. How would their analysis of social networks and social capital change if they were here today?

      This is a new line of research and theory!!

    1. Along these lines, I would argue that it is difficult to measure online participation with social capital. An individual might use digital devices to play Solitaire. Alternatively, the individual might be heavily involved in moderating a Dancing with the Stars community forum or enjoy playing a massively multiplayer online game that requires group coordination.

      These are the new questions raised by the digital world. What does digital social capital look like? Have our new ways of interacting replaced bowling? Are we still as social only in different ways?

    1. who we associate with, and understanding the impact of those relationships increases

      This is fundamental to sociology as a discipline. We call it peer pressure, social support, social capital, norms, etc. This is why many who use SNA see it as the best methodology for doing sociology.

    1. friend’s friend’s friend’s

      This is called the horizon of visibility. We generally know who are friends friends are but it is really hard to know who are friends friends friends are. SNA and the internet give us sight beyond the horizon. I wonder if that makes a difference in our choices or social capital?

  15. Sep 2015
    1. At times, however, friendship can be a source of jealousy and competition. According to a psychological theory called the self-evaluation maintenance model, we tend to be happy for our friends' success, but only if the success is not in a domain that is also important to us, and only if the friend is not too close. If our friends' successes threaten our own self-esteem, we may distance ourselves from them or even try to sabotage them. Friendship can also be a liability if we base our self-worth on our friends’ approval: For individuals high in friendship-contingent self-esteem, depending too much on friends can make our self-esteem unstable and increase symptoms of depression. Building social capital with friends. How can we make the most of our friendships? One approach is to be mindful of the subtle ways that jealousy can erode friendship and to find ways to reframe friends’ potentially threatening successes in a way that highlights shared benefits (e.g., your friend might be able to help you improve and reach your own goals) and that involves taking your friends’ perspective. Friends need our support and encouragement just as much when they are up as when they are down, according to research.
    2. In short, it pays to be a giver on social media, not just a lurker or a taker.
  16. May 2015
    1. I’m intrigued by the notion that social networks could eventually replace our currency. If economic growth lives up to the hype, we’ll all live like the rich someday, so why not print our own money, too?

      I've often thought that my ideal currency would actually be a multitude of currencies, each person minting their own (or even multiple), but I don't see at all what this has to do especially with art.

      I think the point being made is that art has valued tied to the reputation of the artist. Mostly true, perhaps, but probably not unique to art. Credit scores seem not dissimilar except that individuals aren't lenders. Familiar social dynamics like "friendship" and "trust" might capture what we're talking about, though.

  17. Feb 2014
    1. The conservative influence of property does not, however, depend on primogeniture or even inheritance -- features that gave property a valuable role in Burke's political system as well as in the political theories advanced by Hegel and Plato. n11 Within a single lifetime, property tends to make the property owner more risk-averse. This aversion applies both to public decisions [*291] affecting property, such as taxes, and to personal decisions that might diminish one's property, such as investment strategies and career choices. Inheritance and capital appreciation are only additional characteristics of traditional notions of property that tend to stabilize social stratification.