One idea that I’ve been focusing a lot on these days is Social Capital. It is one of those popular phrases that doesn’t get explored enough. Blogs and online social networks are a way of building social capital, and people wonder how to transform some of that social capital into economic capital; not an easy task.

In Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, he provides a little more insight into social capital. He divides it into bonding social capital and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital is what ties a community together. Members of a community share a common bond, they talk about it and it empowers them. Bridging social capital is how people reach out to other communities and connect them.

People often criticize the blogosphere as being high in bonding social capital and low in bridging social capital. The lefties bond with the lefties and the same thing happens on the right. I’ve always thought of it in terms of the second degree of friends in an online social network. A person focused on bridging social capital may have lots of friends, and one on bonding social capital may have a smaller number, but even if they have the same number, it becomes more apparent when you go to friends of friends. With bonding social capital, they are all friends of one another and the number of friends of friends isn’t substantially different from the number of friends. However, for bridging social capital the difference can be great.

However, this is based on an incomplete view of social networks. Two of the key components of a network are the nodes; people in the case of social networks, and links; relationships in the case of social networks. A third component of any network is the traffic over the network; the communications between people in a social network.

This provides a better view of social capital. Yet even with this, social capital isn’t well described. In many ways, the social capital of a company can be viewed as the corporate good will, which you can get a view of the quantification on some balance sheets. Yet how do we quantify an individual’s social capital? In Dollars? In some other unit, to be described?

For dollars, if you put them in the bank, they will sit there, gathering interest. You can spend them, and they are gone, or you can invest them with certain levels of risk. Social capital seems different. If it is a function of the communications between people, it needs to be constantly maintained. Unlike dollars in the bank, if you just let it sit there, it disappears.

Likewise, spending social capital is less clear. You don’t spend social capital and earn social capital the way you spend and earn dollars. If you ask someone to do something for you the change in your social capital is a function not only of how much of your social capital you put into getting them to do something, but also what their reaction to it is.

If I spend a bit of my social capital trying to get friends to do something, and they have a great experience, that could boost my social capital significantly. If they have a horrible time, it could drain my social capital significantly, directly and indirectly.

A good example of this is the arm-twisting that went on at the Connecticut State Democratic Convention over the weekend. Dan Malloy’s campaign spent a lot of social capital trying to get delegates to vote for him. They had some powerful proxies speaking with delegates and in the end, enough delegates changed their votes for Dan to win the party endorsement. Winning the party endorsement can be a big boost in your social capital, but in this case, when you factor in the ill will that it generated with many delegates, it may well be that the net change in social capital for Mayor Malloy was negative. The change for some of his proxies may have been even more negative.

Even with this factored into our understanding of social capital, there is still another part that is incomplete. In a recent email exchange, I received this comment:

I'm not too fond of the use of the phrase "bridging social
capital" As being a theologian, I am very uncomfortable with notions and phrasing that dehumanized human interaction. We are not "brands"
nor "consumers" nor "capital."

I remember reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou back in college. There is so much more to human interaction than the ebbing and flowing of social capital. We are so much more than brands, consumers or nodes in a social network. If our interactions are focused simply on maximizing social capital, then they are bound to fail because such a focus devalues the other humans in the social network and this devaluation diminishes the prospect of gaining social capital.

Perhaps Joni Mitchell sums up the issue of social capital best:

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
Its life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all