The Future of Change by Ray Brescia;

Author:Ray Brescia; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-11-04T20:00:00+00:00

A New Kind of Social Capital

Digital networks appear capable of enabling leaders, organizers, and individuals to cultivate relationships, develop stronger networks, coordinate action, build consensus, and activate their strong and weak ties for collective action. In short, digital tools seem capable of generating many of the same benefits that theorists suggest social capital offers. Because those benefits might be easier to generate, is this new type of social capital, what I will call “synthetic social capital,” as effective as traditional social capital for generating and sustaining trust in the service of solving collective action problems? When digital networks seem capable of creating the durable networks that lead to collective and cooperative action, synthetic social capital also seems to generate the capacity to solve collective problems.

Synthetic social capital appears capable of generating many of the same capacities as “real” social capital, at least at the outset. It facilitates participation and communication and can generate trust, lower social distance, and help people overcome the challenges of coordination. While traditional social capital does not reside in an individual, but rather in the relationships between individuals, digital tools can replicate those ties and serve as the pathways on which communication and coordination of efforts take place. Digital tools can help foster trust and trustworthiness and can do so with ease and at a lower cost than traditional means of building social capital. This synthetic social capital is not a substitute for traditional social capital but can generate some of the same benefits and can do so with less trouble. Since social movements must overcome the costs associated with participation, if synthetic social capital can bring down such costs, it can enhance the capacity for movements to coordinate action, build trust, and solve collective action problems together.

In May of 1997, a decade before the introduction of the iPhone, IBM’s Deep Blue computer did something no one thought was possible at that point: it defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.75 It is not uncommon now in certain chess matches for teams of humans joined by computers, what are called “centaurs” in the field, to compete. It is also not uncommon for such teams to take home the top prizes in such tournaments thanks to their ability to combine human intuition with the technologies of machine learning, big data, and superfast processing speeds.76 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee posit that racing “with the machines” as opposed to against them or without them is going to prove necessary in the present and very near future.77 Community organizers may benefit from this notion: that digital tools can enhance their ability to build trust, coordinate action, and bring about social change. To this point, I have tried to show that social capital, even synthetic social capital that pulses through digital networks, is an essential component of civic engagement and social movement efforts to address collective action problems. Communications tools—what I have called medium—are central to this effort. But so are two other components: a functioning, translocal network and an inclusive message that touches on interest convergences.

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