Stepwinder

I’ve committed myself to a more careful read of Robert Putnam’s well known book this week. I’ve resisted it for a long time. You can’t study political science for long without reading Putnam’s work or the many responses to it. This debate in the field explains the heaping helping of skepticism for many of the social web’s claims. Social media enthusiasts suggest social capital on the web is as easy as friending, liking and checking in. I wanted to re-visit Putnam’s work with these claims in mind.

Has the social web addressed the problems of social capital Putnam identified or provided a satisfying alternative model?

Answers the social web owes Robert Putnam:

• In what ways do our online relationships foster reciprocal exchanges that both imagine future interactions as well as invest in their positive outcomes?

• If research suggests offline volunteering leads to more interest in and less cynicism about politics, what forms of online behavior do the same? What forms promote disinterest and cynicism?

• Following the work of Verba, Schlozman and Brady (Voice and Equality), Putnam discusses the civic skills volunteerism cultivates. What skills are required for individuals to effectively participate in social and political causes online and what civic skills do those activities promote?

• Putnam suggests professionalization and commercialization have “hollowed out” civic participation While voluntary groups have increased their efficiency membership in them is more akin to consumerism than activism. Where do current causes on the web fall on this continuum? Is it being used to bring social connectedness back to causes or is there an alternate narrative to consider?

• Social capital is the substance created through norms of reciprocity, honesty and trust, so Putnam argues the “social fabric” of the web is threadbare with sporadic and fragile connections. How do online communities establish and maintain these norms? How do we assess the tensile strength of these communities or is their strength found in other characteristics?

In the end, Putnam delineates four challenges to building social capital in “computer-mediated” communities. Two ideas have absorbed our attention: the digital divide and cyberbalkanization:

• The digital divide refers to the socioeconomic differences between individuals online and offline. The white, wealthy and well-educated are more likely to be online and more likely to participate in their communities. Before the social web can be a tool for democracy, the representation of those participation online has to be more representative providing a catalyst to change the demographics of who is participating more generally.

• Balkanization refers to constraining one’s interaction on the web to the like-minded. If the wealthy and well-educated use the web to reinforce their own ideas, it then becomes a tool of “bonding” social capital within groups but offers little promise for “bridging” social capital between them. Assuming interaction between groups is not acceptable. The web’s potential for participation requires us to think deliberately about what kinds of participation are essential to a democratic society and how the social web can facilitate that participation.

Pew Internet and Life is one group that regularly documents the scope of the digital divide. But the difficulty remains even as more individuals go online. Accessing the web is not the same as using it to join a group or engage a cause. The discussion of cyberbalkanization demonstrates the difficulty of what comes next. It focuses on important questions about how people are using the Internet. If the social web seeks to take social connectedness seriously, it has to resist the temptation to claim every minute spent online as connectivity.

Innovation in business, government and social relationships requires more than plugging in. To make this point, Putnam turns to the hubbub about the telephone, a tool Alexander Graham Bell believed would revolutionize business. Early executives even discouraged socializing by telephone! Putnam chronicles a whole generation with a “mismatch between the ways people actually used the telephone and how industry men believed it would or should be used.” Proving social capital happens on the web requires talking seriously about how people use these new tools of connectivity rather than assuming they use them the way we’ve decided they do.

Concerns for the digital divide and cyberbalkanization have crowded out the last two challenges Putnam presents. They also provoke important questions about how social capital happens online:

• The poverty of social cues online: Communicating on the web is inherently different from face-to-face communication. Where these in-person networks are “dense and bounded,” online communities are “sparse and unbounded.” Putnam argues this inhibits interpersonal collaboration and trust, especially if online communication is anonymous and detached from a wider social context.

• Passive online activism: The web has potential to provide either passive and private entertainment or active and social communication. Putnam argues the “commercial incentives that currently govern Internet development seem destined to emphasize individualized entertainment and commerce rather than community engagement” (2000:179). Yet another warning to avoid counting time online as time engaged.

In the end, Robert Putnam warns us that social capital is a difficult proposition. The enthusiasm for new social tools often sweeps right past the challenges Putnam outlines in Bowling Alone. Before the social web can realize its much trumpeted potential, it has to seriously consider social capital, its difficulties offline and how this translates to online communities.

***As I’ve discussed these questions with some of my favorite people in tech, we had a few additional questions of our own. I share them here in the interest of further discussion:

• Is there a natural limit to the number of concurrently active participants a community can sustain?

• As a community exceeds this threshold, is it unreasonable to expect all individuals to participate equally in equal ways?

• Is it more likely that sub-communities coalesce around particular activities (while withdrawing from others) so civic needs are met in the aggregate?