Network Capital

Material from the essay: Network Capital: an Expression of Social Capital in the Network Society. Manuel Acevedo. The Journal of Community Informatics, Vol 3, No 2 (2007)

URL = http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/267/317

Description

Manuel Acevedo:

"People have a timeless tradition of cooperating to achieve common results. There may be something genetic in our ability to pool together for common goals, as well as in being shaken by others’ suffering. Despite issues of competition (sometimes taken to appallingly cruel extremes), persons have been helping other persons (beyond family or professional contexts) throughout history.

It is relevant to discuss social capital in the new context given by the emergence of a new phase of history, the Information Age, and its functional structure, the Network Society. Wellman writes that “the transformation of national and global societies into ‘network societies’ suggests the usefulness of thinking of social capital as a product of personal community networks as well as of formally institutionalized groups.” It is well beyond the scope of this article to try to explore social capital in this new social context. Rather, our focus here is merely one aspect of it, which can be named ‘network capital’.

Communities are no longer defined only by place, but also by interest, becoming organized into social networks. When the interaction takes place among members of an electronic network, which are likely loosely-knit in geographic terms, the resulting social capital is network based. Network capital could then be understood as a measure of the differentiated value in the Information Age that communities structured as social networks generate on the basis of electronic (digital) networks for themselves, for others and for society as a whole.

In this context, network capital can become a valuable asset for human development for two main reasons. First, because of the earlier mentioned importance of social capital for human development – and network capital being but one expression of social capital in the Information Age. Second, because development cooperation is meant to be an accelerator of human development processes, and the generation and investment of network capital has the potential to significantly contribute to renewed models of development cooperation in the Network Society.

There is insufficient treatment of this particular aspect of social capital in the literature, perhaps because it is only very recently with the meteoric rise of the Web 2.0 phenomenon that it is approaching enough of a critical mass to make a difference. Wellman describes network capital as the form of social capital that makes resources available through interpersonal ties. He writes that it consists of “knowing how to maintain a networked computer, search for information on the Internet and use the knowledge gained, create and sustain online relationships, and use these relationships to obtain needed resources, including indirect links to friends of friends.” [Wellman 2001] and that it can be measured by “the frequency of social contact with friends, relatives, and workmates.” While these are indeed elements of network capital, they clearly do not sufficiently explain it.

Community Informatics (CI) is a field that draws closer to the idea of network capital. Simpson [2005] refers to social capital constructed via CI, clearly making use of ICTs but not entirely due to ICTs and e-networks. CI-generated social capital indeed has some elements of network capital (see listing ahead) – we could say it is ‘ICT-aided’ social capital. Network capital, on the other hand, is ‘ICT-enabled’ social capital [Van Bavel et. al. 2004], admittedly an elastic differentiation and one to further explore. However, this difference is one that points at social capital created almost exclusively through electronic networks, plus it is not bound by physical location as often occurs in CI. In Castells’ terms, network capital is the social capital of the ‘space of flows’.

While it is arguable that the accelerated emergence of Web 2.0 applications may radically transform the use of the Internet over the next 10-15 yrs., it has undoubtedly already provided the necessary e-tools for communities that form social networks to elevate their interaction by quantum leaps. There are 2.0 tools for weaving social networks (personal or professional), to support collaboration (wikis, content aggregators, groupware, mapping, tagging) or to simply facilitate content sharing (videos, photos, RSS feeds, podcasting or the ubiquitous blogs). These are being used in waves by a generation that grew up with video games and PCs, at such a scale where it may soon deliver significant effects, in social as well as economic terms.

This massive and current instance of technological social absorption provides a powerful added stimulus to advance the analysis of network capital, so we can better understand the nature of interaction, trust and collaboration over the new global digital environment. Such improved understanding will serve various purposes, whether in promoting its positive outcomes (e.g. to defend human rights or to provide income-generation opportunities) or in preventing/correcting pernicious consequences (such as criminal activities or the spread of intolerant social values)." (http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/267/317)

Characteristics

"Network capital can be characterized through a combination of attributes, only some of which may normally be manifested concurrently in a given community:

• It is a result of cooperation via electronic networks, and in turn fosters the habit of such cooperation. This cooperation includes sharing of information and the use of computer-mediated-communications but it goes further towards group work, the creation of specific products, and the achievement of set objectives.

• It is largely produced by volunteer action and contributions (though not exclusively, as it can be operationalized within organizations like companies).

• It is created by communities of interest, where membership is based on personal interest, skills, background/experience and sharing of a common purpose. While network technologies allow for anyone in the world with Internet access to take part (in fact many virtual communities are geographically dispersed), physical proximity may be a factor as well, as evidence from local community/citizen networks, as Gurstein [2000] has shown.

• It is generated by people organized as a virtual community who share a communal cyberplace as for example through a simple e-discussion list, a suite of groupware applications, or a sophisticated 2.0 virtual environment like Second Life.

• It is largely produced from asynchronous communications which provide greater flexibility for the human nodes of the networks and allow them to take advantage of the ‘timeless time’ (ie. asynchronous) features of the Network Society [Castells 1998].

• It has been particularly concerned with knowledge generation, and thus adds a special value to knowledge-intensive processes (such as those related to scientific, R&D, policy-making or development cooperation).

• It favors the expanded participation of people in matters of common interest, by facilitating the logistics and dynamics of such involvement. It thus opens up a wider array of possibilities for individuals to behave as ‘global citizens’, and to become involved in actions and issues not bounded by their physical location."

(http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/267/317)

Example

"An early and still paradigmatic example of network capital comes from the creation of Free/Open Source software (FOSS). People from different locations, who may not ever see each other, use Internet and net-based tools to exchange information, generate knowledge, work collaboratively and develop well-defined products, ‘all for the love of it’. These people consider themselves as software artists (even activists), and participate on a voluntary basis. They meet at specific cyberplaces, eg. distribution lists, extranets or project management applications, and sometimes in person as well, at conferences or other public events.

FOSS communities have crafted a culture of sharing and solidarity which not only makes their processes sustainable, but is a stimulus and reference for others to also pursue electronic-based collaboration. The ‘Open-Source’ approach is becoming known for its methods and philosophy in fields outside of software production, as a collaborative methodology. This collaboration helps the individuals who take part in it, and the resulting products help specific personal or institutional users, as well as large sectors of society who in this way have additional software choices made available to them – a good example of knowledge as a global public good. FOSS programs such as GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl, Firefox, OpenOffice, MySQL or PHP have all become intrinsic parts of the digital environment." (http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/267/317)