Facebook - the bling of social capital?
After an irresistible surge of peer pressure I finally gave in and created a facebook profile this weekend. My initial resentment towards putting too much energy into maintaining yet another web 2.0 profile was spawned by the seeming lack of a shared theme or, in the parlour of computer science, a shared object like music on mySpace.com, communication on kommunikationsforum.dk or growing up rural on bondeknold.com. Normally I would expect every self-organizing web community to be exclusively differentiated and organized around a relatively narrow thematic code, but facebook doesn’t seem to work that way. Or does it?
Where other 2.0 apps organize around differentated themes, they don’t show off the users’ social capital to users that are not a part of your immidiate network. An intriguing paper in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication by Nicole Ellison et al. show that there is a connection between facebook use and social capital among students at the Michigan State University. Ellison’s study reveals a crucial clue to understanding what facebook does for me: it shows off my social capital (friendly connections) to a wide audience.
Facebook is to social capital what bling is to money. In stead of showing off your riches, it shows off how well connected you are. They even made little accessory apps to put on your profile to add a little extra ice. My favorite is called the ‘Friend Wheel‘ and it shows acircular ego network model as proposed by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz in Watts’ now infamous book ‘Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age‘. Here is my current friend wheel bling:
Blue: People I grew up with
Turquoise: High School friends
Green University alumni
Yellow: Work colleagues
Red: Miscellaneous aquantances
Your friends are iced out bling and chrome rims on a big ass SUV!