Week 4 - Social Capital: Now vs. Then

If one looks at the timeline of technology, the rise of social media websites is incredibly recent. Creatures have been using technology long, long before Homo sapiens came along about 200,000 years ago. The oldest known tools were made of stone around 2.3 million years ago, in a period of time called the Oldowan Industry.

To put this into some perspective, I am going to give a percentage of how long social media technologies have been around compared to the history of technology. It is difficult to define exactly when social technology was invented, but to start I am going to give a very liberal number and say 225 years ago, when the telegraph was invented in 1792. I am counting the telegraph as a social media technology since it allowed communication from long distances using technology, like an extremely rudimentary version of Facebook.

So if we take 225 years, and divide it by 2.3 million years of technological innovation, we get 0.00009782608, or 0.009782608%. This means that even if we take a very generous number, social media technologies have only been around for less than 1/100th of 1% of the history of technology. If We take a more conservative approach and take a starting point of when the first social media websites came along, the number is obviously even smaller. If we start with what is often considered the first social media site, SixDegrees, created in 1997, we get 0.000869565%. 

Either starting point you use, it's still an extremely small amount of time that these technologies have been around, yet, they are changing our world INCREDIBLY fast. When we were evolving in our tribes, our sphere of influence consisted basically of the people in our tribe, or within walking distance of other tribes. With social media technologies, our sphere of influence is all around the world.

And this is where the idea of social capital is important. We learned this week that social capital is the assets that come from our relationships with other people. We can bounce ideas off each other, support each other emotionally (or physically if we are with them in real life), and meet people with similar goals, values, and interests.

With new social media technologies, our social capital goes up dramatically from what we used to be able to have. If I have an idea for, say, a website that you could upload a picture to and it would scan a database of pictures to find your Doppleganger, I could contact a graphic designer in Sweden to do the designs, a marketer in Australia, and a programmer in Canada, and never even have to meet them in person to make the site. I could feasibly do it all without even leaving my apartment. This gives individuals much more power than they used to have. Or does it?

Something that I think is wort thinking about is, if everyone has access to this potential level of social capital, does that make us all equally powerful, or equally powerless? I have 2 thoughts on this. The first is I think that one can use the internet to gain social capital faster if they are driven to do so, and also are smart about how and where they gain these relationships from. People who have a goal, or people who are savvy about fostering relationships for these sorts of things, will probably have more social capital than someone who only uses the internet to post food and cute animal pictures (NOTHING wrong with food and cute animal pictures, I post them all the time, but it should be in moderation).

The second thought I have is that these technologies for gaining social capital is possibly widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. Individuals who have a personal computer are probably going to have more power than people who have to go to a library to use one, and the people who have access to one at a library are going to probably have more power than people who do not have access to one at all. However, I think these technologies could be extremely beneficial to humanity if everyone had immediate access to these resources. So people in third-world countries could use it to help their businesses, etc. There are some websites, such as Kiva, that use the internet to help poor people, so that is an example of this power for good, even if the poor person does not have a computer themselves. This is obviously just scratching the surface of whether social media technologies widen or lessen the gap between the rich and poor because there are so many factors to consider, but it will be interesting to see how it keeps affecting the gap in the future.