The Creation of Social Capital in Virtual Communities

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Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
— George Santayana

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.
— Voltaire

It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another does so far enslave his mind, but it is a salutary servitude, which allows him to make a good use of freedom.
— A. de Tocqueville

Introduction

Despite the sea change in mass communications that has been wrought by the internet over the past ten years, it is still too early to make anything more than general statements about its record thus far in fulfilling its vast promise. One thing is certain: we have now reached a state where technology can and routinely does foster and mediate the development of virtual communities characterized by trust, norms and networks. We see examples of it everyday: two strangers complete a transaction on eBay, having neither met, spoken to nor ever seen one another. Professional networking communities such as LinkedIn allow members to endorse one another’s work, and help mediate introductions between individuals that could be many degrees of separation apart.

How could all this be accomplished other than through the existence—and effective use—of some form of social capital? Clearly, the norms, networks and trust that characterize “traditional” social capital can be formed without face-to-face contact being necessary. Though this may have been made possible by the telephone in earlier generations, never has it been possible on the scale that emerging internet-based technologies now promise. The question that remains to be answered is whether the networks, norms and trust fostered by various virtual communities actually amount to social capital as we understand it. In case the model for virtual communities differs from the “real” world, how do we go about understanding the quality and nature of the social capital that is mediated, and how it is put to effective use by the community’s members?

Objectives

The idea put forth by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) ^[20] that “social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communications” raised, at the time of its writing, an important and timely question. Can social capital, or some useful substitute, be built and mediated exclusively through technological platforms, or must it necessarily be supplemented, or even preceded, by face-to-face interaction?

This paper seeks to provide a basis for answering this question. James Coleman, the pioneering social capital researcher, proposed the idea that

social capital, like physical and human capital, is not completely fungible but may be specific to certain activities […] Unlike other forms of capital, social capital adheres to the structure of relations between and among actors.

To this, there is a clear parrallel in virtual communities, and it is this dimension that forms the underpinnings of this paper.

Methodology

This field represents, at present, a vast and untapped wealth of opportunities for research in a wide range of disciplines. Much of the work now being done is of a broad nature, seeking first to classify and categorize the range of observed manifestations in order to set up a framework for future research. This paper will present an analysis of the quality and characteristics of the social capital that is created in communities which are either wholly or partly mediated by technology, and propose avenues of further research.

I will begin by establishing a working definition of “virtual community” that can be used throughout this paper. This definition will be informed by the work of previous researchers, and will feature the best elements of the definitions that are currently in use. To be sure, this definition will be broad, but it will nevertheless serve to illustrate a vast and complex field that is only now starting to be understood by researchers.

Second, I will propose a modification to the typology of virtual communities advanced by Porter (2004) ^[18] by allowing for the classification of communities along an auxiliary set of attributes. This modified typology will help discriminate between the different types of communities and, more importantly, the type of social capital that is involved.

Finally, I will explore broad issues that are germane to the study of virtual communities, and contrast them with past and current developments in an effort to understand the course of their evolution.

A definition of the virtual community

The rapid pace of technological evolution in the latter half of the twentieth century is such that the definition and common understanding word “community” are no longer inexorably restrained by geographic boundaries, but rather now encompass even ideological boundaries. Haythornthwaite (2002) ^[11] defines a community by “what we do rather than where we live,” epitomizing the flat-world view that the reach of human communities is no longer bounded by geography, but increasingly by affinity. Granovetter (1973) adds to this view:

Even liberated from geography, community depends on creating and sustaining strong interpersonal ties, those based on multiple exchanges that include social and emotional content, intimacy and self-disclosure.

Humanity’s hardwired gregariousness compels us to seek association and affiliation not only to groups with whom we share interests, but also to groups with whom we share a common history and language. These dimensions are often omitted from academic literature, especially that which presents a narrow disciplinary focus. Porter (2004) ^[18] defines a virtual community as

[an] aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms.

This definition is more than adequate fore the purposes of Porter’s thesis, which proposes a broad typology of virtual communities. For this paper, however, we will need to differentiate among the “shared interests” which might bring individuals or business partners together in the first place. Because these interests can be as varied in kind as they can be in intensity, the quality and nature of the ties that are engendered and mediated through technology will be correspondingly varied.

Shared characteristics

Traditional or “offline” communities exhibit distinctive characteristics which are shared with virtual communities. These aspects include adherence to common goals, membership requirements, the presence of hierarchy and roles, a shared history, a common meeting place, the social construction of rules and behaviors and the emergence of a community-specific vocabulary (or “paralanguage”) (Haythornthwaite, 2002) ^[11]. To what extent the formation of social capital is contingent upon the presence of these characteristic dimensions, and whether the absence of certain dimensions critically hampers its development, are questions this paper will seek to address.

A typology of virtual communities

Recent work by Porter (2004) has sought to define a typology of virtual communities in an attempt to wrest some order from an emerging and often confusing phenomenon. Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn or Spoke are both vibrant virtual communities, but have different aims and are intended to build different types of connections than, say, eBay. The strength, nature and usefulness of the social capital created in each instance will obviously differ qualitatively depending on the type of community involved. Further, the reasons individuals will join and contribute to these virtual communities will differ appreciably. It is therefore important to understand how these different models of virtual communities act as mediums for the formation of social capital.

Porter’s work sought to categorize virtual communities by establishment type and relationship orientation. However, virtual communities come in many varied forms, and exist for as many purposes as there are websites. Hence, a more apt typology would first attempt to define the community by its goals, not in the strict and limited reading of its potential, but in the quintessential facet of human interaction that it is meant to enhance or mediate. From this intrinsic purpose, a typology based on the the type of connection that is meant to be mediated could be devised that more adequately frames the expected outcomes of the community in terms of social capital.

The purpose of communities

There are many reasons why one would seek to understand and classify virtual communities. Certainly, a solid academic understanding of this rapidly expanding ecosystem would provide a sound basis for documentation of the medium’s evolution and impact on society. This is what Porter’s model attempts to do, and though it is an appropriate first step, perhaps we could also be well-served by an understanding of how a community’s central purpose either succeeds or fails at creating social capital. Therefore, rather than define virtual communities by how or by whom they are established, this paper proposes to use what the virtual communities exist to mediate, as well as how this is accomplished, as the characteristic attributes to be examined. There are a number of reasons why this is expected to provide valuable insights.

First, it has been observed by Kraut (2005) ^[14] that most groups’ participation levels drop off sharply, sometimes mere days after their creation. Few actually even survive for any meaningful period of time. This is the hallmark of normal evolutionary forces, where abundant variety gives rise to a few survivors, whose unique set of adaptations and characteristics allow them to thrive. Why do only a few succeed while the majority of others fail? What lessons can we learn from the ones that do survive in terms of their ability to create conditions under which communities will thrive? Understanding what kinds of connections or participation types work under what circumstances could ultimately prove informative in the design of new communities.

Second, while the very earliest stages of the web’s evolution were characterized by exuberant, ambitious—even naïve—experimentation, the second phase that we have entered promises to be far more cerebral and strategic. Media critic and NYU professor Douglas Rushkoff ^[23] has words of caution when considering the web’s seemingly limitless potential:

The commercial incentives that currently govern Internet development seem destined to emphasize individualized entertainment and commerce rather than community engagement.

Rushkoff, while at once an active and insightful researcher into the role of media in society, is also one of the original authors of a declaration written by so-called “technorealists,” a group of individuals concerned with the steady and inexorable slide of the internet towards commercial interests. The document, called Technorealism ^[22] calls for a more proactive involvement in the deployment and use of technology in our everyday lives, and warns against letting commercial interests dictate the course of future development. This is not baseless fearmongering: already, we have witnessed the near-extinction of Usenet groups, the original discussion forums that constituted the very first online communities, as they became overrun by commercial messages. Understanding the forces and conditions that serve to create meaningful ties through technological means is one way to avoid letting commercial interests dictate the course of future developments, and empower those that seek to use technology to foster and develop new forms of social and civic associations.

A new typology

What this amounts to is the blurring of the distinction between commercial and grassroots endeavours, such that the only thing that matters is the raison d’être—the purpose—of the community. Though this list is not complete, and in many respects paints the issues as being dichotomous (which is never truly the case), it presents an auxiliary set of attributes that can be looked at to gain further insights into what motivates and sustains member involvement in certain communities. Therefore, it is believed that analysis along the following dimensions could provide useful insights.

Social/asocial: Are the contributing individuals or the community as a whole the primary beneficiaries of members’ efforts? Professional and social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are clearly meant to foster bridging social capital, and the expectations and behaviour of members will reflect this central purpose. Though every individual benefits from each other’s adherence to the stated group norms, the benefits of each individual’s efforts accrue primarily to the individuals themselves. The systems work on a code of honor made salient by the use of highly personal data.

By contrast, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by users, only serves its purpose well when users devote their time and effort with the entire community in mind.

This distinction is helpful because it draws out the ultimate reason for each member’s involvement. Social or professional networking sites that are predicated on each user’s in-group would fail at their most useful function, namely to expand social networks by establishing bridging links. The evolution of Facebook has proven to be a great case study in this, as successive evolutions have added a multitude of search possibilities based on interests, shared histories, affiliations, etc. Though Wikipedia allows users to interact, it focuses their interaction on the tasks at hand, namely collaborating on article entries in order to refine the content. Though some users would indubitably enjoy the ability to converse in a more casual manner, the community’s efforts and structure are geared towards a clearly understood goal: the production of a reliable and accurate source of encyclopedic knowledge, freely available to all.

Community of shared interests/commercial community: Is participation for its own sake the reason for member involvement, or is it geared towards a commercial exchange? This dimension represents a pretty nebulous dichotomy, as there are numerous examples of the coexistence of these two types of communities. A great case in point is Amazon. To be sure, user reviews of products and services further the commercial aims of the firm by providing users with unbiased opinions upon which to base purchasing decisions. Fundamentally, the system also allows for customer expression, and though this is not meant to create social capital by design, the “community” of reviewers thus created cannot be discounted as frivolous in this regard. Users can achieve levels of standing, which in turn provides credible and uinbiased word-of-mouth advice for customers.

Perhaps the easy comingling of these two types of communities is due in no small part to the fact that commercial interests are by far the most active colonizers of the virtual world. This topic merits further attention, and is addressed by itself later on in this paper.

Closed/open community: Does the community benefit from restricted or from unlimited access? This dimension addresses the issue of the scalability of large-scale collaborative endeavours. Again, a great case in point in Wikipedia, which places no restrictions on who may or may not contribute. The open-source model of collaboration places a premium on quantity over quality, an ethos that was summed up by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, one of the largest and longest-running collaborative development projects on the web: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Though this model is more vulnerable to disruptive behaviour, it succeeded by providing the scaffolding for further refinements in content: entries, even poor ones, are easier modified than created outright; hence, what matters is getting it started.

Though Wikipedia is not meant to create social capital per se, it does serve to provide a stage for the manifestation of individuals’ desire to contribute and garner some measure of standing in a community of peers. As such, it is driven by a different set of norms and rewards.

The internet and human contact

In Bowling Alone ^[20], Putnam documents the decline in social capital through the proxy of community and civic engagement. He puts forth the notion that television has been at least partly responsible for our decrease in social engagement, chiefly because it is fundamentally an asocial activity. And much like television—perhaps even more so—the internet holds the promise of both bringing us together and further isolating us, depending on whether one subscribes to utopian or dystopian views. As Putnam asks, “Is erosion of social capital an ineluctable consequence of modernity, or can we do something about it?”

Reversing the trend: the role of the internet

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is perhaps the most comprehensive study ever performed on Americans’ use and perceptions of the internet and its role in the development of social capital. John Horrigan, in a 2001 report for the Pew Internet & American Life Project ^[12], is optimistic about the internet’s potential:

[The] Internet might be able to reverse the trend. Since the early days of the Web, activists have argued that “community networks” could bind increasingly fragmented communities together and provide a voice for segments of society that have been traditionally ignored. Such electronic communities can lower the barriers to democratic participation. […] These advocates do not argue that it is inevitable that the Internet will create community involvement, but rather that the Internet presents an opportunity to build community at a time when the need is great.

These are heartening findings in such tumultuous times. Overall, the report suggest that the internet is “increasing interpersonal connectivity and organizational involvement.” As a caveat, however, the report warns that “this increased connectivity and involvement not only can expose people to more contact and more information, but it can reduce commitment to community,” a reminder that the internet’s potential to unite us is by no means a foregone conclusion. Indeed, to the extent that the internet engages users primarily in asocial activities, such as web-surfing and reading the news, then “even more than television, its immersiveness can turn people away from community, organizational and political involvement, and domestic life. By contrast, when people use the Internet to communicate and coordinate with friends, relatives, and organizations—near and far—then it is a tool for building and maintaining social capital.” The results of this study further suggest that

the effects of the internet on social contact are supplementary, and internet use increases participatory capital. The more people are on the internet and the more they are involved in online organizational and political activity, the more they are involved in offline organizational and political activity.

The report doesn’t suggest inferences about how internet activity influences political participation, though it does posit that there may be a positive correlation.

Thus, the greatest insight that it has provided is that the internet has actually served to increase social capital. With this capacity comes a distinction that is entirely unique to the internet. That the internet can help enhance “live” communities as well as mediate the development of entirely virtual communities is fairly easy to understand. Close-knit groups formed on shared interests, norms and cultures are plentiful, and forming such associations is something that humans do as a matter of course. However, the internet presents the possibility of a finer level of granularity in searching for and identifying these shared interests, and to the extent that the resulting communities can be defined by ever-narrower set of criteria (“retired blue-eyed zebra trout anglers from the western Upper Peninsula”), these communities will be fairly insular. This balkanization of cyber-communities (or “cyber-balkanization”) represents an appreciable impediment to bridging social capital.

Another dimension that makes virtual communities potentially less “sticky” than traditional communities is the ease with which members can enter or exit. Trustworthiness and reciprocity will tend not to not develop in communities of fly-by contributors, or ones where the purpose of participation is limited in scope or longevity. Registration requirements help mitigate this phenomenon somewhat, but by and large, the extent of the members’ level of involvement in the community is dependent upon the building blocks of trustworthiness (the ability, integrity and the benevolence of the community’s members) and the individual relevance of the group’s endeavour.

In the face of such tremendous promise, and at a time when the need for meaningful change is high, it becomes increasingly important to be realistic about our expectations of the possibilities and promise offered by the internet and technology. From concerns of technology’s ability to bring us together, we now look at the internet age’s most treasured bounty: information.

Information is not knowledge

A prescient poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her collection Huntsman, What Quarry? speaks to the explosion of information that the internet is enabling, and more specifically to the paucity of any real, impartial means for individuals to make good use of it all:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.

It’s easy to understand the author’s warning, and it is a problem that even Alexis de Tocqueville observed more than 160 years ago ^{[7] [8]}. However, where St. Vincent Millay contemplates the situation with forlorn resignation, de Tocqueville saw in it the possibility to truly liberate the masses:

It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another does so far enslave his mind, but it is a salutary servitude, which allows him to make a good use of freedom.

Does the internet indeed act as a confusing “meteoric shower” of facts unwoven into a coherent fabric for the masses? Or does it perhaps offer the possibility of harnessing the opinions of the masses as an expedient means of sifting through an avalanche of information? Google’s stated mission is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To a certain extent, they have. However, organizing the world’s information requires brute force; making good use of it requires different skills altogether, which isn’t an activity that can be attended to by philanthropists, and Google is an unabashedly commercial enterprise. To imagine that commercial interests are aligned with the better realisation of mankind’s relationship with technology is, to put it bluntly, naïve.

The key to making meaningful use of a collective’s opinion lies in a phenomenon that was artfully chronicled in James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” (2004) ^[24]. In studying various instances where the “wisdom” of the collective far outperformed the most dedicated efforts of experts, Surowiecki identified the requirements for establishing credibility in the precarious balance between “mass folly” and “mass wisdom.” Here are what he deemed to be the attributes of wise crowds:

1. There must be a diversity of opinion;
2. The opinions must be independent and not influenced by each other;
3. The crowd must be decentralized, i.e., free to specialize and draw on local knowledge;
4. There needs to be a mechanism for aggregating individual opinions into one mass opinion.

These attributes are almost the sine qua non of virtual communities, and we have seen tools appear that make good use of the internet’s ability to gather, aggregate and render vast amounts of data in a meaningful whole. Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool, scours users’ bookmarked favourites and presents a second-by-second portrait of what has captured the online community’s interest. Buzztracker follows daily news activity and presents it in the form of a world map with “hot zones”: locations on the globe which are making headlines at that particular moment. Technorati tracks the ever-expanding “blogsphere” to determine what people all around the world are writing about at any given moment. Flickr is an online repository of user-submitted images which, while primarily offering printing services, also presents moment-by-moment updates of what images users are sharing.

The internet’s immense potential is also being paired with the ubiquity of mobile communications in ways that will redefine the human social landscape. Dodgeball is a social networking application which resides both on the internet and in users’ mobile phones. It allows users to “tag” locations in the real world with their own personal comments, and makes the “community’s” comments available to any user, anywhere. It also allows users to make themselves “visible” to other users—or not—in a passive way, by posting messages for other members of the community (“I’m at Luna Lounge and I like to talk about the Mets”).

The possibilities are almost limitless, and though these examples only allow for rather prosaic snapshots of social activity, one can imagine the immense power that could be made available when such tools are combined with artificial intelligence, and users can query the web universe for, say, the best way to grow spinach in southern Indiana, or how new social security legislation will affect them personally.

A caution from our better angels

On March 12, 1998, in an attempt to assess the social and political implications of technology on human affairs, twelve technology writers, including author Douglas Rushkoff, penned the Technorealists Overview and Statement of Principles ^[22]. The intent of the Technorealist approach is to encourage a continuous examination of how technologies ultimately help or hinder us in our quest to continually improve the quality of our lives, our communities, and our economic, social, and political circumstances. It is divided into eight principles, the fourth of which states that

[all] around us, information is moving faster and becoming cheaper to acquire, and the benefits are manifest. That said, the proliferation of data is also a serious challenge, requiring new measures of human discipline and skepticism. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom. Regardless of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

Whereas de Tocqueville sees a liberating force which can further empower us to “make good use of freedom,” there exists the danger that this servility to the word of another will make for a citizenry that is less capable of differentiating between information, knowledge and wisdom. But the web defies such easy classifications, and users have already shown tremendous discernment.

Integrity goes a long way

Take the case of the Drudge Report. Started by Matt Drudge in 1995 as an e-mail dispacth, the Drudge Report is now more or less Drudge’s personal news portal, where he uses a wealth of insider contacts to break stories, sometimes before they even hit mainstream outlets. In 2005, Drudge reported over 3.5 billion visits to his website . How has he achieved such notoriety, especially since industry commentators, depending on the bias, consider him either a reckless maverick or a visionary? Quite simply, the fact that he is not affiliated with nor on the payroll of any major news outlet confers in him a veneer of integrity, which he alone is responsible for sustaining. And aside from a few minor blemishes, his integrity has largely remained untrammelled.

Further, he doesn’t write the news himself, but merely presents interrelated stories from various outlets under headlines which suggest a common link. The reader is left to make the connection between the stories—and readers have indeed shown a desire and ability to make the connection. In essence, Drudge has succeeded in garnering for himself a certain level of social capital, and has done so chiefly by showing himself to be capable at what he does, by gaining the trust of his readership, and by refusing to abuse this trust.

De Tocqueville observed that the power of the press must increase as equality does to counteract the inertia of crowds. In other words, the means through which marginal viewpoints are propagated must be strong enough to counter the forces of conformity to which large groups are susceptible. In an ever-expanding sea of information and opinions, there is a premium placed on sources that are seen as being free of bias, and the currency of this premium is trust.

The Issue of Trust

A critical building block of social capital is trustworthiness, and in a context where non-verbal cues are either poorly represented on wholly absent, as is the case in computer-mediated communication (CMC), this dimension takes on added importance. Indeed, an added challenge of CMC is the appearance of disruptive behaviors made more prevalent by the cloak of anonymity often afforded by technology. Robert Axelrod (1980) ^[1] defined the role of trust as follows:

The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship […] Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other.

In “The Wisdom of Crowds” (2004), James Surowiecki refines this argument by giving the example of tipping. To be sure, in a restaurant one visits frequently, there are immediate and expected advantages to tipping well. But people still tip in restaurants they are not likely to ever visit again, so what, if anything, can be gained from being kind to strangers?

The answer, in economic terms, lies at the heart of the workings of capitalism. In many respects, it’s as though the potential short-term gains that could result from the exploitation of a situation for personal profit are “understood” to be detrimental in the long run. There is in fact a strong argument to be made that this may very well be the case. Humans cooperate, either in business or in society, because cooperation benefits everyone, and doesn’t amount to a zero-sum game, where the benefits accrue to one at the expense of another. This is as close to a hard-wired axiom of the human condition as can be found. In Sartre’s “No Escape,” when Garcin says that “hell is other people,” he is summing up the human condition: we are condemned to one another’s companionship. Though this dependency makes us vulnerable, it also allows us to accomplish far more than we can do alone, and the cornerstone of these relationships is the perpetuation of this basic condition of trust.

The blog phenomenon has revealed the extent to which users are ready to slough off the cloak of anonymity afforded by technology. We should not be surprised to see users increasingly put their true selves online: like children who have grown weary of the novelty of mindlessly fiddling with a widget, we have moved on to make more productive and enlightened use of the full potential afforded by the widget. We are effectively entering the second movement of the internet era, and while the first was characterized by anonymity, the second is already shaping up to be oriented towards the seamless integration of the “real world” with the virtual world.

Take the simple example of the review system on Amazon. The online retail giant makes it possible for users to post product reviews under their own name, rather than pseudonyms (it uses credit card information to verify a user’s identity). It also keeps a tally of users’ activity, and how many times a review has been deemed helpful by other users. There are no prizes or rebates for top reviewers; in fact, strictly speaking, a user’s status helps no one in any measurable way. Why Amazon would encourage the development of such an extensive community of freelance reviewers is a fairly evident question of brand- and loyalty-building. The interesting question is, Why would so many users contribute so much time—freely—if for no other reason than to increase their status in a community of strangers?

The answer is largely that traditional book reviews written by paid, professional writers, and diffused by newspapers or magazines carry with them the twin scarlet letters of being written by “someone not like me” and perhaps, just perhaps, written by someone who was paid to promulgate an agenda. Amazon’s scheme allows users to take the advice of their peers—unbiased and unpaid people “just like them”—and to gauge at a glance just how valued any given reviewer’s opinions are by other users. Karen Cook (2005) ^[6] sums up the benefits of this kind of system when she says that

[obligations] are diffuse and uncertain, and they carry risks of defection or exploitation—in other words, opportunism. Therefore, trustworthiness and the ability to assess it both matter.

Limitations

A frequent criticism of technology-mediated communications is the paucity of the information conveyed, relative to “richer” forms of communication like video, voice or live conversations. Indeed, absent video or audio cues, how can deep and relevant social ties—social capital—develop in online communities? Can computer-mediated communications (CMCs) create viable proxies for these building blocks?

Traditional concerns about the possibility of creating meaningful bonds through technology are largely based upon “prevailing notions of community as dependent on co-location, and by concerns about the alienating nature of CMC” (Haythornthwaite, 2002) ^[11] and because

CMC does not convey the full range of communication cues, such as voice tone, body language, dress and seating arrangements, it has been considered unsuitable or inappropriate for “rich” communications […] Perhaps most damning from a community perspective has been the notion that CMC could not convey “social presence,” the feeling of “being there.”

IBM’s Social Computing Lab is currently working to find ways to make CMC a “richer” form of communications, which, it believes, will lead to more socially meaningful exchanges. Among the projects under development are two instant-messaging applications which feature proxies for social presence. “Loops” and “Babble” are the two projects that formed the basis for WorldJam, a company-wide exchange of ideas mediated through the internet. Of 330,000 employees worldwide, the WorldJam event brought together 50,000 in a three-day session, the ultimate result of which was the first draft of IBM’s core values.

Working together: the Internet as a tool for large-scale collaboration

Perhaps the prototypical large-scale collaborative endeavour—also the best-known—is SourceForge, the world’s largest open source software development community. It boasts over 1,000,000 registered—and unpaid—member-developers simultaneously working to develop and refine over 100,000 concurrent software projects. More importantly, it is widely recognized that the open source model of software development that was pioneered by SourceForge often results in content that is of higher quality and sophistication than that produced by paid professional developers.

Such massive collaboration projects quickly become unwieldy in “real life,” in part due to coordination issues, but mostly because there exists no way to meaningfully aggregate the efforts of a large number of individuals into a coherent whole. One of the hallmark aspects of those task-oriented virtual communities which succeed in establishing a loyal user base (Wikipedia and SourceForge being such examples) is the presence of a well-defined task within which users’ efforts are framed. And though this task may be broad in ambition, it can be resolutely modest in execution: in virtual as in real-life endeavours, a well-defined task is crucial in guiding efforts to a meaningful end.

And also as in real life, the level to which individuals identify with a group is as much a question of their ability and interest for the task as it is about finding a role for themselves to play in the group’s endeavour. Humans are gregarious creatures, to be sure, but above all we crave order: societies thrive, or slip into anarchy, when there is no proper balance between the “chiefs” and “indians.” In the case of SourceForge, there are not only rules and a shared history, but also a hierarchy of roles and responsibilities. Haythornthwaite (2002) ^[11]:

[Long] term members of communities may adopt the role of mentors and take it on themselves to introduce "newbies" to local rules, and to chastise them for contravening them […] Rules of behavior provide an identity for the group, a shared history that provides a way of knowing how to behave and how to anticipate the behavior of others. Correct behavior can also be used as a means of validating the membership qualifications of others, e.g., when language and message content are out of synch with normal discourse in the group, it can signal a deceptive incursion into the group.

Virtual cooperation in the future

A phenomenon is on the rise. We are on the cusp on a merging of technological platforms and media, and the future looks more interconnected than could ever have been dreamed of. But a parrallel world is emerging, and it isn’t bound to the earthly constraints of the physical world that we inhabit. This world is as boundless as one’s imagination—and humans are an inventive lot.

Any investigation into the creation of social capital in virtual communities would be woefully incomplete without mention of the video gaming industry. Inching closer than ever to creating the very first fully self-sustaining virtual societies, complete with currencies, mercantile exchanges, and “land” developers, video games have evolved from mere entertainment to legitimate models for massive cooperation. Second Life is one such virtual world. In it, users can buy land, develop it, build houses, factories, even run businesses. Indeed, the residents of this virtual world are more than social roamers. They create and sell clothing, they devise marketing plans, and they forge alliances with one another. And lest all these efforts be fundamentally limited to this virtual world, the results of these exertions can spill over into the “real” world: Second Life currency now trades at about 300 Lindens (the online world’s own currency) to the US dollar.

More importantly, the enthusiasm and entrepreneurship displayed by the residents of this virtual world is creating real economic value: to date, the total value of the work performed by Second Life residents is estimated to be worth over $410M—and these residents paid for the privilege to perform this work! Ultimately, what it is hoped this will lead to is a better understanding of how and why individuals perform mundane tasks (devising a marketing plan in the virtual world and in the real world entails the same effort) with such enthusiasm when it is done in the context of a game. Perhaps we can glean something from our dual propensities for social association and play that would be informative in building new models for cooperation.

Conclusion

This paper set out to perform a gargantuan task: to chronicle the emergence of social capital in virtual communities. The convergence of information technologies, changing attitudes towards global trade and cooperation, and the maturing of the online world, all point to a future that is in full becoming. We are witnessing the tremulous beginnings of a whole new phase of human social evolution. Understanding and exploring the various facets of this emerging world is an important task, to be sure, but one fraught with difficulties.

Will mankind’s collective wisdom be meaningfully unleashed in the virtual world, or will commercial interests further compartmentalize and focus our online endeavours? How will we choose to make use of our collective potential? These questions will be answered in the short term, but only through a global understanding of the stakes will be be able to judge to wisdom of our efforts. Perhaps this paper will serve to give a primer on the issues at play, and help the reader understand the vastness of the potential that is offered by technology, as well as the inherent risks.