Norris (2004) brings up some worrying trends in his studying of bridging and bonding social capital on the Internet. While its promising that there is concrete evidence, not just from the Norris reading but also from the IRL documentary we watched two weeks ago and from my own observations of the online community I am following for my short paper 3, that bonding is happening on the Internet, it is also troubling that bridging is not happening with the same success. There has been some discourse recently on the dark side of our disinterest with bridging, even when we inadvertently avoid it. For example, when your Yahoo home page allows you to personalize your news feed to bring you only the content from your specified areas of interest, you are unlikely to be exposed to articles that have a different perspective than the one you already hold and connect you to people that have similar areas of interest. This “digital bubble” we can create for ourselves is representative of the internet’s bonding capital strength, but if we aren’t exposed to differing opinions, or individuals from different backgrounds, are we are ally growing in our understanding? This was the subject of an interesting TED talk if you want to know more, http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html.
Ellison et all (2011) confirmed information that I had already been observing through Facebook myself. The lowered cost of maintaining a large network meant that one could utilize latent ties to access more diverse sets of resources. For example, today on my news feed, I read an interaction between two mutual “friends” who don’t know each other well but when one requested medical advice through a status update, the other who is a nurse was able to respond within minutes. Without a platform like Facebook, the original “friend” may have had to go to the doctor to receive the same information. This bridging capital exchange at least calms some of my concerns about the “digital bubble” previously discussed. Additionally, the reading on CouchSurfing confirms that a sense of belonging is necessary within a community if individuals are expected to maintain membership and engagement over a sustained period of time. This was evidenced by the reinforcement of engagement and belonging felt by members who either participated in a face to face interaction as a result of membership and those who received targeted communication rather than mass emailings.
Social capital builds over time and I’m convinced that it thrives only when users are willing to open up to “friending” people outside of their established face to face community. While I’ve expressed my concerns about deminishing bridging behavior, the opportunity of bonding and the ease of maintaining large networks that SNS provides is invaluable in my personal life. I’m able to have more meaningful and rich relationships with people who live outside of my physical location and tap into latent ties for everything from restaurant recommendations to selling furniture.
The whole idea of bridging and bonding is an interesting discussion. Most of us can point out examples of bridging and bonding on Facebook and Twitter. My issue with bridging is that I think humans are generally averse to certain aspects of it. Take political discussions on Facebook as an example. I won’t shy away from talking politics offline with close friends in the appropriate setting, but I can’t stand arguments on my social media feed about such topics, especially coming from weak ties or people I really don’t even know. I can only stand so many opinions, especially from ill-informed people (there are many in my Facebook network).
So I guess my point is that bridging to some degree is a utopian concept. In an ideal world, people with diverse backgrounds and beliefs would be a part of the same network. But practically speaking, humans generally gravitate toward people like themselves. How many of us are married to someone with completely different political, religious, and/or world views? Not to say this never happens, but I would put money down that this is not the norm. It is probably far from it.
I like your broad view on the ways of using communities and SNS’s can benefit our lives. There are so many tools right at our fingertips and social groups to help us in an instant if needed. I like that we can control who we friend or what communities we join for various reasons. The questionable evil is privacy. With all the marketing and business “tracking” in the background it seems that we are never able to 100% control our SNS and Community relationships.