Terminology
- Social Capital
- The effective functioning of social groups through:
- interpersonal relationships
- a shared sense of identity
- a shared understanding
- shared norms and values
- trust, cooperation, and reciprocity
- Bonding Social Captial
- A type of social capital that describes connections within a group or community.
- Bridging Social Captial
- A type of social capital that describes connections between groups.
- Community of practice
- A group of people who share a craft or a profession.
Key Takeaways
- A small minority of users are responsible for the majority of the content.
- Social collaboration in software is very effective. See: Steve Bomber on Open Source
- Social tools are value agnostic. See Pro-Ana.
Broadcast vs Communications Media
Classic media production falls under two broad classifications:
- Broadcast media: One-to-many messaging. Examples include books, newspapers, radio, television, move theatres.
- Communication media: One-to-one conversations. Examples include: telegraph, phone, snail mail.
Social tools are like walkie-talkies: they do both.
Publish-first –> Filter-first
The cost of classic media production is high. Publishing companies were created to decide what was worth printing because it was impossible to publish everything. These institutions filter, then they publish (all at a financial cost).
Social tools drop the price of publishing down to zero. It’s now possible to publish everything. We just share whatever we want, whenever we want and we leave the filtering to somebody else.
Filtering is Google’s primary business model.
But how do we filter unlimited information?
Filters
Classic filters
- Time: when the content is relevant. Example: evening time-slots in television.
- Location: where the content is relevant. This filter was removed when we began remote delivery of this program.
- Classification: what the content is. Tagging is a cooperative implementation of classification (kind of).
Social filters
- likes: who likes the content and/or thinks it’s relevant to them.
- up/down vote ratio: who thinks the content is credible.
- comments: who has taken the effort to create content themselves.
Mass amateurization of communities of practice
Use of these tools has resulted in the “mass amateurization” of classically professional media industries:
- journalism –> blogging, Titter
- photography –> Flicker, iStock, IG
- television –> YouTube, Twitch
This has also enabled the evolution of micro-niche learning communities that are no longer limited by geography and access to a means of production. Not always a good thing: See Institutions vs Collaboration @ 17:00 regarding Pro-Ana.
Collective Action
Collective volunteer effort toward a common goal can be categorized into three groups of increasing difficulty:
- Sharing: the easiest form of effort because social tools allow us to share for free and there’s often no oversight.
- Cooperation: more difficult because it requires a change in behaviour to synchronize participants. Conversation is the first step toward cooperation and the creation of a group identity.
- Collaborative production: the most difficult scenario happens when no one person can take credit for what gets created and the project could not happen without the participation of many.