The Creation of Social Capital in Online Communities: Project Scope
Saturday, March 25, 2006
This project takes some cues from the work I did during the summer of 2005 for IBM’s Extreme Blue program. Whereas the ultimate goal of that particular project was to effect a democratic renewal in Ontario (no less!), the objective of this project will be to dig deeper into one of the most fundamental issues that were revealed during the course of the IBM project: the scalability of democracy.
Humans—for the most part—have long since evolved past the point where we lived as nomadic groups of relatively few individuals, linked by common ancestry (if not by blood). In such situations, the formation of ties is characterized by necessity: each individual has a role to fulfill, and the group’s proper functioning, even its survival, depends on it. Social capital, in this case, is formed as a matter of course.
The modern world has many complexities that make these social adaptations insufficient. More and more, our destinies are tied to those of people to whom we are not tied by either ancestry, blood or perhaps even ideology. For our societies to function properly, we depend on those to whom our fates are tied to behave in ways that are beneficial—or at least not harmful—to all. What was discovered last summer was that the Athenian ideal of demeocracy was straining to keep up with the ever-expanding groups in which humans now live. Part of our solution to this then became to provide a means through which citizens could work together to get further involved in their communities, and to do so in a way that was complementary to the current pace of their lives.
An immediate and fertile avenue to explore then became a medium that allowed for collaboration on a scale that was heretofore impossible: the internet. And though the set of collaboration tools we devised were a great first step in this direction, a number of questions were left unanswered. Among these questions were issues concerning privacy and the handling of disruptive behaviour, but more importantly, we needed to know how to build ties—meaningful ties—to other individuals through a medium like the internet. If we want citizens to use the internet to connect, collaborate and participate in meaningful endeavours together, we need to know how social ties can be formed in the absence not only of personal contact, but personal intimate knowledge.
More and more, the internet is becoming a place where users want their contributions to be acknowledged as their own. Blogs have empowered normal people to share their views with a vast audience, some faring better than others. What are the means by which certain bloggers have achieved levels of credibility such that their views are held above those of traditional news outlets? What is the character of a person’s online behaviour/persona that makes him/her trustworthy?
By the same token, with websites like Amazon, IMDB (the Internet Movie Database), as well as a host of other websites which aggregate the contributions of their members, we are seeing that the internet is increasingly being used to effectively and meaningfully collect, make use and leverage the efforts of a large number of contributors in a way that has heretofore been impossible (or prohibitively expensive). Users write reviews for Amazon’s various products, which in turn inform and help other users in their purchasing decisions. How do some reviews get more credit than others? What are the cues, subtle and overt, that users seek in order to determine whether a certain reviewer is worthy of their trust?
This project endeavours to uncover the means which now exist, and elaborate upon them in order to forecast how such measures can be made more effective. That the web is a marketplace of ideas is undeniable—this is not new. That it can actually become a place where people collaborate and establish meaningful ties based upon attributes analoguous to those used in “real life” still remains to be established.
Humans—for the most part—have long since evolved past the point where we lived as nomadic groups of relatively few individuals, linked by common ancestry (if not by blood). In such situations, the formation of ties is characterized by necessity: each individual has a role to fulfill, and the group’s proper functioning, even its survival, depends on it. Social capital, in this case, is formed as a matter of course.
The modern world has many complexities that make these social adaptations insufficient. More and more, our destinies are tied to those of people to whom we are not tied by either ancestry, blood or perhaps even ideology. For our societies to function properly, we depend on those to whom our fates are tied to behave in ways that are beneficial—or at least not harmful—to all. What was discovered last summer was that the Athenian ideal of demeocracy was straining to keep up with the ever-expanding groups in which humans now live. Part of our solution to this then became to provide a means through which citizens could work together to get further involved in their communities, and to do so in a way that was complementary to the current pace of their lives.
An immediate and fertile avenue to explore then became a medium that allowed for collaboration on a scale that was heretofore impossible: the internet. And though the set of collaboration tools we devised were a great first step in this direction, a number of questions were left unanswered. Among these questions were issues concerning privacy and the handling of disruptive behaviour, but more importantly, we needed to know how to build ties—meaningful ties—to other individuals through a medium like the internet. If we want citizens to use the internet to connect, collaborate and participate in meaningful endeavours together, we need to know how social ties can be formed in the absence not only of personal contact, but personal intimate knowledge.
More and more, the internet is becoming a place where users want their contributions to be acknowledged as their own. Blogs have empowered normal people to share their views with a vast audience, some faring better than others. What are the means by which certain bloggers have achieved levels of credibility such that their views are held above those of traditional news outlets? What is the character of a person’s online behaviour/persona that makes him/her trustworthy?
By the same token, with websites like Amazon, IMDB (the Internet Movie Database), as well as a host of other websites which aggregate the contributions of their members, we are seeing that the internet is increasingly being used to effectively and meaningfully collect, make use and leverage the efforts of a large number of contributors in a way that has heretofore been impossible (or prohibitively expensive). Users write reviews for Amazon’s various products, which in turn inform and help other users in their purchasing decisions. How do some reviews get more credit than others? What are the cues, subtle and overt, that users seek in order to determine whether a certain reviewer is worthy of their trust?
This project endeavours to uncover the means which now exist, and elaborate upon them in order to forecast how such measures can be made more effective. That the web is a marketplace of ideas is undeniable—this is not new. That it can actually become a place where people collaborate and establish meaningful ties based upon attributes analoguous to those used in “real life” still remains to be established.
posted by Nic at 3:09 PM
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