Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

theplan


research, comment, ephemera by Jon Hickman

Filed under: social capital

Who are the social capitalists?

184905660_348357b10e_b
Regular readers of this blog and interactive cultures will have picked up that I have a preoccupation with social capital. So you won't be surprised to learn that when I met up with the new intake on the MA Social Media for the first time this year, social capital was the key thing I wanted to discuss with them.

The students had already begun to engage with the topic at A New Currency: Multiplatform storytelling and social capital, and the session gave me a chance to build out from that point to discuss the many definitions of social capital that we can find in academic literature.

We closed with a question which the students have gone off to consider:

Who are the social media capitalists?

If we have such a thing as social capital, is there such a thing as social capitalism? Who would we consider as "social media capitalists"? How useful is social capital to understanding what happens online? Does it change the way we look at online activity?

Read the rest of this post »

LinkedIn has a language problem that is actually meaningless. So get over it.

Folk I know, particularly I'm thinking here of folk best described as "social media types", are a bit sniffy about LinkedIn (direct link to my profile).

I wonder if it's stuff like this that puts them off? The capture below is a box I get when adding someone to my network on Linkedin. Before I can add someone to my contacts list, I need to tell Linkedin about how I know them, and this quickly breaks down the process because of the way language is imposed on the activity:

Invite_kelly_to_connect_linked

In this example "Kelly" can only be a "colleague", "classmate", someone I've "done business" with, a "friend" or "other" (if you select "I don't know Kelly", Linkedin will tick you off as the network is supposed to be about real relationships*, and not a way of meeting new people).

Do relationships work like that? Not really, people slip between categories (how about a friend who you went to Uni with and now work with? Where do they go? What box do they go into?). For many folk, these categories don't even make sense because our world doesn't consist of "doing business". In my case the people I want to keep in touch with are academics, media professionals, and past, present or future students; my contacts don't fit well in these boxes. So students become "colleagues" (which is kind of nice, as I prefer to teach in a collaborative rather than an authoritarian mode), and folk I've met at conferences are probably people I've "done business with".

My hypothetical "social media types" are used to having more control over their data than this. They're used to tagging objects in ways that make sense to them, and using multiple tags so that they can retrieve the right data at the right time. LinkedIn doesn't allow this. It presents itself as  a "social" tool but speaks a language that seems asocial to those who really care about what social media is and does, and how it works.

So does that mean Linkedin isn't for them?

Read the rest of this post »

Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism

Last week I attended the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research where amongst other things I gave a paper, Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism.

Taking all of your ideas and presenting them in less than 15 minutes is pretty hard going when you're used to having captive audiences in lecture rooms for up to an hour, so I was delighted that several people wanted to read the full paper and get some more detail from me. So here it is, my full paper.

Some folk I know will be a little put off by these 8,000+ words, so if you're not used to reading academic work, the best plan is to read the abstract, then the conclusion and then work your way through the detail. You can also catch a pithy version of one of the themes over at Interactive Cultures.  This is draft work at the moment. Following a pep talk from Paul Long (my BCU colleague - Reader in Cultural Studies at Birmingham School of Media) yesterday, I'll be honing this down for publication over the rest of the summer.

Click here to download:
ethnographyofonlinenewsFINAL.pdf (260 KB)
(download)

Social capital: you're doing it wrong*

(img cc kelvin255)

*not really. I'm being provocative, but I do have some ideas about another way of using the concept when talking about the Internet.

I wrote a brief piece over at Interactive Cultures last week, which was a neat distillation of a lit review I've written about social capital and a key point from my paper, which I presented to IAMCR 2010. Here's the blog post and here's the inevitable Flickr photo of my IAMCR badge (I collect my name badges)

​