Linking social capital - What networker-type are you?
My friend Timme and I had some interesting discussions about his article (in progress) for the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. He chose not to include my input about link typologies and their connection to conversion of social capital between offline and online arenas (and vice versa), but I think its worth publishing an early draft here for critique: The article is a study of linking in the Kforum business network for communication and marketing professionals in Denmark. On the Kforum network users categorize their relations to others in four types of relations. From the perspective of an ego-user the four types of links are:
- Inbound - unconfirmed: Link is established by other user with no confirmation by ego.
- Inbound - confirmed: Link established by other user confirmed by ego.
- Outbound - unconfirmed: Link established by ego with no confirmation by other user.
- Outbound - confirmed: Link established by ego confirmed by other user.
These four types of social link relations are visible to all other users on each profile. This means that both social inclusion and exclusion is visible to all other users in the network whenever and wherever a user chooses to navigate unconditioned by mutual confirmation as on Facebook and linkedIn. However, even though more visible on Kforum, these four basic link types are prevalent in most online networks.
As illustrated in the table, the different prevalent link typologies represent different mods of conversion of social capital between online and off-line arenas. People with mostly inbound- links are typically either persuing a defensive strategy passively protecting their offline social capital by simply not linking (inbound - unconfirmed) or attemting to construct online social capital to be converted to offline arenas by contructing new relations through confirmed links (inbound - confirmed). The resulting strategy, or behavioral modes, for networkers with mostly inbound links are passive or constructive.
Networkers with mostly outbound links are typically either actively linking to people they know already from offline arenas, converting their accumulated social to the online network (Outbound - confirmed) or spamming the network hoping to create new relations at random thus acummulating new social capital through ultra-weak ties (Outbound - unconformed). [Inconsistency in the table to be rectified shortly. Sorry..] The resulting bahaviours are here called converting and signaling.
So, what kind of networker are you? Passive, constructive, converting or signaling?