MC409 - The Internet makes us less sociable, with implications for social capital.

I. Introduction: Greetings, Poindexter.

The traditional stereotype of a computer user, coming out of representations rooted in the

hobbyist culture of early personal computers and software hackers (not to be confused with the

programmers of malicious computer programs, crackers), was one of a pale, socially awkward nerd

who lived in his parents basement and played Dungeons & Dragons with his geeky friends, when he

wasn't compiling code or drinking soft drinks by the liter. These Poindexters, who were often at least

perceived to be outcasts, were the ones who initially flocked to personal computers and, once it was

developed (or, indeed, after they had developed) the Internet. In a time when the processing power of a

cutting edge personal computer was less than we find in a mobile phone today, and the networking

tools that did exist required some amount of expertise (or at least a tutorial) to use, it was not easy to

convince the mainstream that these were exciting communication tools. So, for many long years they

remained the province of those supposedly sad and lonely nerds. From this origin arises the fallacy that

the Internet is somehow a place without sociability, where lonely people become consumed with sitting

alone in a dark room, communing with himself.

In truth, the Internet is an intensely social place, and always has been, even when those geeks in

the basement were the only ones online. It is full of people meeting, conversing, sharing and playing

with each other. Even the kind of people using computers has changed so much since the days of the

nerds that we cannot even generalize about their appearance (Bakardjieva & Smith 2001: 71). Although

it is true that when one sits in front of a computer one is not literally sitting across the table from a

friend, sharing a face to face conversation, it is also true that sitting on the other side of the screen from

an Internet user are untold millions of people to interact with, if only one makes the effort. The

interactions that take place on the Internet, the relationships that can develop and the activities that

Internet users can engage in together may be virtual, but they can have very authentic effects on the

experience of Internet users in real life (or IRL) (Wellman & Gulia 1999). Friendships are forged,
romantic connections are made, arguments flourish and collaboration occurs online, just as they do

offline, the only difference being that these interactions are mediated via a glowing screen on a desk.

Even when it comes to real life interactions, the Internet plays an important role in social cohesion, in

the communication between and among social groups, and in the planning and logistics of real world

events. People maintain contact with distant friends and relatives that they otherwise would not be in

touch with through the Internet, and make new friends, both in their own neighborhoods and on the

other side of the world, through the Internet which allows them to connect to each other.

In this paper, I will engage with the prompting statement, which posits that the Internet makes

people less sociable and negatively effects their social capital. I will argue against this position and

attempt to establish, through the use of theory and examples, that the Internet is a great tool for social

interaction and indeed has the opposite effect on sociability and social capital.

II. Thousands of 'Friends' But No One to Talk To

Having gotten off to such an emphatic start, I feel it necessarily to slow down. Mindful of

Wellman and Gulia (1999)'s warnings of Manicheanism on both sides of the debate over sociability and

the Internet, I would be wise to avoid hyperbole. There are, of course, people for whom the Internet

proves to be a lonely place, failing to fulfill any of the promises ascribed to it by techno-utopianists.

There are also, no doubt, people for whom the Internet negatively affects sociability, or offers a false

sociability: one in which you have thousands of “friends” but no one to talk to. However, the prejudice

that the Internet confronts is one that is difficult to unseat, as evidenced by the prompting statement.

The privilege granted to face-to-face interaction as the ne plus ultra of communication provides a false

opposition suggesting that computer-mediated communications would have to compete with face-to-

face communication instead of supplementing or augmenting it. This has been true over the years just

about anytime a new information communication technology is introduced, from the radio to the

telephone and television. Even in cases where the Internet may be seen as competing with real world
communication, as Wellman and Gulia have pointed out, the Internet is not the first communication

technology to come about that has elicited this claim of threatening sociability and community

cohesion. “Social network analysts have had to educate traditional, place-oriented, community

sociologists that community can stretch well beyond the neighborhood” (ibid: 2). It is not useful to

chase the elusive (and perhaps imaginary) memory of the broadly supportive community, where all

members of the community can count on all of the rest for anything and everything.

So what kind of sociability is there on the net? Certainly in the past year or two there has been

intense mainstream press coverage of social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Notwithstanding the claim that could be made that these social networking sites are simply updated and

enlarged versions of virtual communities that have existed on the Internet almost since its inception

(albeit one in which people now tend to trade with their real world names instead of the pseudonymous

usernames of earlier social networks), it is instructive to consider the way that people use these

networks to maintain social ties. boyd and Ellison (2007) note that the use of the term 'networking'

when describing 'social networking sites' can be somewhat misleading. Users tend not to do so much

networking (that is, meeting new people) on these websites as much as “primarily communicating with

people who are already a part of their extended social network” (boyd and Ellison 2007). This needn't

be read as demonstrating how the Internet fails to make people more social because they don't make

new friends on social networking sites. Far from it – social networks provide a low barrier means to

establish and codify relationships as they are made in real life (Ellison et al 2007), and as such are a

useful tool to maintain and track relationships that have been made in the 'real world'. After people who

are active users of social networks meet, particularly in situations where they are introduced via mutual

friends, it is common for those new acquaintances to 'friend' each other on a shared social networking

site.

This effort reinforces the strength of weak ties (Granovetter 1973), providing a link between the

two previously unconnected people who can now reach out to one another as needed – or not at all. The
presence of a connection between the two new acquaintances need not be trumpeted as a triumph of

Internet sociability – indeed, they may never communicate with each other again. But the ease with

which the connection can be established, and the virtually costless means to maintain that connection,

should it ever be needed, provides a valuable function for building social capital through the Internet

(Bakardjieva & Smith 2001: 73). Social capital, the resources arising from participation in a network

(Coleman 1988), is a crucial element of sociability that can lead to improved connections with other

groups, the ability to share knowledge or relationships with those within your network and the ability to

influence or direct activities among your social network. If social networking websites such as the ones

discussed thus far can be shown to play a role simply in managing and maintaining social capital

thusly, then it would suggest that the Internet, broadly speaking, is in fact beneficial for sociability and

social capital.

III. Creating Content From the Bottom Up - Together

We've seen how people use the Internet to manage and develop their social capital through

social networking sites, particularly in relation to their 'real world' networks. But what about the much

vaunted power of the Internet to bring people together from different sides of the globe around shared

goals? There are still people who make these lofty claims, and there are numerous examples of

websites where this kind of interaction occurs between countless users in the service of shared goals

(Poor 2005). To illustrate this notion, I will present several examples of sites that have come to be

known by their method of producing and developing content through the combined efforts of the

numerous users of the sites. User-generated content (UGC), as it is known, employs a distributed

method of production to provide tools and management control to users (sometimes all users,

sometimes only accredited users – but to be considered a UGC site, the process of accreditation should

be open to all) who then create the raw content, whether it is editorial copy, illustrations and photos or

analysis and feedback that drives the product of the site. Recognized as an important element of so-
called “Web 2.0”, a “set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that

demonstrate some or all of those principles” (O'Reilly 2005: 1). According to Tim O'Reilly, who

coined the term that has launched a thousand explanatory columns in the business section of stodgy

print newspapers, user-generated content plays a crucial role in effective social web sites: “network

effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era” (ibid: 2).

Practically applying the concept, user-generated content is a social element of numerous new

websites that allows individuals to contribute in some degree, be it large or small, to the content of that

website. On the social news website Digg, articles that are seen as interesting by more users become

placed more prominently on the main page. On the video sharing website YouTube, clips that are more

popular become featured on the front page. The social aspects of UGC can be as fundamental as

providing users the ability to create an entirely new entry in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, or to

rewrite the introductory paragraph of any of the established ones. It can also be a more benign effort,

where the actions of users in aggregate are taken into account by an algorithm which is then able to

feed more interesting suggestions to users on Amazon. In all of these cases there is a social element of

Internet users' activity that has a contributory effect on the experience of others. Instead of sitting down

in the basement all alone with a glowing screen, users are engaging with a virtual public in their every

move – recommending news articles for their friends on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site), tagging

photos to make them more easily accessible o Flickr (a photo sharing site) and contributing to a

discussion in the comments section of a blog on Wordpress (a blog-hosting site).

Ok, so these options exist. But why do people spend time writing blog posts or editing

encyclopedia entries without any form of remuneration? As the Internet has continued to become an

ever more social place (with ever more new users signing on), it has become an even more competitive

place in the race for status. Lampel and Bhalla argue that status seeking is “a social passion that drives

participants to invest time and effort in giving the gift of their experience to others” (Lampel & Bhalla

2007: 435). Contrasting efforts to gain status online with off, they find that online status relies
primarily on reputation, whereas in the real world there are other considerations, often beyond ones

control (an inheritance, for instance, or class standing that was attained from birth). “In online

communities, by contrast, reputation is often the main resource that can be generated and used to

achieve the same end [improving one's standing in the community]” (ibid, 439). These are social acts,

intended to improve one's social standing, all conducting through the Internet. Not exactly the kind of

activity that has negative consequences for sociability and social capital – indeed in this case we are

talking precisely about social capital in virtual worlds.

And social standing acquired online can be transferred into the real world. There are numerous

examples of bands and personalities who have spun careers out of their MySpace pages (Tila Tequila,

for instance, netted millions of 'friends' before being offered her own show on MTV (Grossman 2006)),

or bloggers who have been hired to work for magazines and newspapers. The benefit of the Internet for

improving ones social standing is that, at a certain level, the cost/benefit analysis lends itself to creating

and producing, even if nobody is paying attention. Imagine a journalist who worked hard on a pamphlet

and spent time and money producing a print run. For this journalist, she has invested considerable

resources in writing, editing, designing, printing, selling and finally distributing her work. If nobody

wants to buy it, she is facing a considerable loss, both financially and socially for her failure. For the

same journalist to publish the equivalent of her pamphlet on a blog, she can avoid much of the toil of

the production and distribution of her work and focus instead on the writing and marketing – the

components that have a higher impact on ones social capital in the first place, her ideas. If nobody sees

them, well that's a shame, but the costs are considerably less than in the previous case – so low indeed

that leaving her blog online indefinitely is entirely feasible, and the likelihood of somebody happening

across the blog remains a possibility at no additional cost.

That's all well and good, and obviously thousands and millions of enterprising would-be

pamphleteers have started their blogs with big dreams. However, Lampel and Bhalla identify a

potential challenge for socially constructed website to confront. In a situation where there is an absence
of tangible, explicit rewards for contributions, can Internet users be expected to continue to provide the

content for these sites indefinitely, solely with considerations of reputation in mind? They see this as

creating a Prisoner's Dilemma situation for online gift-giving, one that may potentially result in an

individuals decision to stop contributing if he feels like he is not receiving any reward for his efforts

(Lampel & Bhalla 2007:440). And yet, as described above in the blog example, there is no catastrophic

situation that comes to pass if unsatisfied bloggers stop blogging – their sites simply fall silent. This

does not necessarily pose a ruinous problem for the Internet as a space of social interaction.

But the presence of 'lurkers' on blogs and other kinds of social websites does introduce a twist

on the role of sociability and the Internet. Are lurkers still social actors on the Internet? They may not

contribute content to discussion boards or chat rooms, but given the way that the Internet operates as a

social space, it's becoming more and more difficult for lurkers to truly remain separate from their

sociable peers. As we saw before, the barriers are so low that one would have to be truly committed to

not engaging in the social construction of websites that one would not rate a feature up or down, share

an interesting link with a friend or select a preference in a poll. These actions are far lower down the

scale than maintaining a blog, creating a profile on a social networking site or uploading pictures to a

photo-sharing site, but I would argue that they still constitute a social action, contributing towards an

individuals social capital and towards the maintenance of the Internet's role as an increasingly vibrant

and vital center for social interaction.

IV Conclusion:

Ultimately, the question of whether or not use of the Internet has a negative effect on sociability

and social capital depends on the way that one defines good social interactions. If being sociable means

taking tea with acquaintances or inviting guests over for dinner every weekend, then it may be that

sociability can be negatively impacted by the Internet – as well as a host of other technologies and

practices like watching television or reading books! But if being sociable means interacting with people

on a regular basis, sharing thought and stories with them, and learning from their experiences, then I
don't see why users of the Internet cannot be considered highly sociable. Of course, if you do in fact

have guests over for tea and find yourself popping off to the study every five minutes to check your

email or see what the lads are up to in the chat room, then the Internet may indeed have a negative

effect on your ability to accrue and retain social capital from your guests. But why shouldn't the

Internet join all of the other information communication technologies that have, over the years, adopted

their place in the repertoire of communication tools used to maintain relationships and build social

capital? Nowhere in Coleman's definition of social capital does he write that it can only be accrued

from face-to-face contact, or through a romantic attachment to letter writing carrier pigeons or

semaphore towers.