Wow, I really enjoyed your comment about the importance of developing social capital. I immediately thought of Tumblr, as my own Tumblr has recently deviated from posting about my personal life to simply reblogging content from other bloggers. With Tumblr, I’ve felt like it is simply more convenient for me to reblog others’ content than for me to curate my own, which has taken a toll in how I think my Tumblr profile truly describes me. Rather than speaking in my own words and style about what I find valuable in life, my personality is curated through others’ content. I wonder if this dependency has to do with the connectedness of the Internet.
Comment on COLLO and Social Capital by Michelle Xu
Whoa, I didn’t know you were a co-founder of COLLO! As a fellow artist, I applaud you for your visions for this group and all that you’ve done! This is not completely related to our readings, but do you feel like the university is very supportive of your group? I know that as a dancer, the student interest dance groups on campus definitely get less support than the TAPS department. Another example would be the extreme difficulty AATP (Asian-American Theater Project) had to face just to book Bing for their production of My Fair Lady. Do you try to reach out to administration in order to develop more support?
challenging axelrod and the three conditions
While reading the 3 Necessary Conditions for Cooperation in Robert Axelrod’s 1984 work, The Evolution of Cooperation, I was struck by how cooperation has changed in the last thirty years and how the sharing structure of the web has altered collaboration. I have contentions about each of his three conditions and will try to explain them below:
- A likelihood of meeting in the future. Axelrod explains that when parties don’t have plans to meet, it is near impossible to hold others accountable for their ends of bargains. He believes that people are likely to become selfish and abuse the relationship if they cannot be held accountable by the knowledge of a future meeting.
- The most obvious example to me of this is with musicians. I collaborate with many musicians, especially beatmakers and try to meet them all to gain connections. But, I and many other musicians I know, have also worked with others that we have never, and will likely never meet. It is easy to hold someone accountable online and damage their reputation if they are flaky or stand you up. Also, if each artist, or collaborator in any field is working for mutual benefit (i.e. exposure, a very lucrative currency online) then they have all the incentive necessary to work hard, whether they meet or not.
- Bike for Three is a collaboration between Canadian rapper Buck 65, and Belgian producer Greetings from Tuskan. The two have never met despite making a great album together. They wrote a song about the concept:
- The most obvious example to me of this is with musicians. I collaborate with many musicians, especially beatmakers and try to meet them all to gain connections. But, I and many other musicians I know, have also worked with others that we have never, and will likely never meet. It is easy to hold someone accountable online and damage their reputation if they are flaky or stand you up. Also, if each artist, or collaborator in any field is working for mutual benefit (i.e. exposure, a very lucrative currency online) then they have all the incentive necessary to work hard, whether they meet or not.
- Ability to identify each other. Accroding to Axelrod, if we cannot identify the person across the network from us, we cannot hold them accountable. Therefore everyone we want to cooperate with must be identified as “a person to the system they’re in and the people they’re dealing with.”
- Each day there is tons of cooperation between individuals and nameless, faceless companies online. I frequently email music blogs for example addressing them by the website name to due lack of an actual name being mentioned and often get responses from them without them providing any name at all.
- Another prime example is collaboration on reddit, where in r/photoshopbattles for example, users take a picture and riff on it and the ideas and photos of others, upvoting the best or funniest changes to a photo just for fake internet points and the fun of it.
- Strangers on reddit also order each other food, send Secret Santa presents, or make donations to almost anonymous users on the honor system, paying it forward.
- A record of past behavior. The author maintains that the best way to judge future cooperation is by judging someone’s status and reputation.
- The most obvious example here to me is venture capitalists in Palo Alto. Often companies are founded by young high school or college students or recent graduates, with little to no past experience or reputation to build on beyond a good idea and some flashy marketing. Yet despite this lack of apparently vital industry cred, they frequently receive hundreds of thousands, and occasionally millions of dollars to turn their idea into a reality, making the prospective of future money a better incentive for cooperation than any record of past behavior.
Though I have more to contend with the first condition, I believe that each of these conditions has shifted due to the changing structure of the internet economy. It will be very interesting to see how these tenants of collaboration hold up in say, 50 years. Will they even exist at all?
Comment on Thoughts 2/21 by Betty Hancock
I was surprised to hear that the event organizers went as far as telling you what signs to hold up. I wonder if from their perspective, it was more about wanting to make things easier for the participants or if they simply wanted to have more control over the PR/publicity/details of the event.
Comment on COLLO and Social Capital by admin
Hey Betty, there are 5 of us who basically run things. We’re actually having an event tonight that’s a student-artist showcase where 5 student artists, including me, Mike Mendoza, Chris Russ, Gabriella Moreno, and David Grunzweig, are all gonna talk about our recent work, process and future plans. It’s gonna be at 6 tonight at the Kimball lounge (with free burritos!). No pressure at all to come, but if you feel like stopping by to check it out, feel free!
Thoughts 2/21
“Reflect on a time when you were part of an event (on the Internet) that was trying to establish social capital. Given our class discussion, how do you think that event could’ve been improved or gone better?”
The most recent social capital event that I remember partly participating online for was a #blacklivesmatter protest in Paris when I was studying abroad there last quarter. I heard about the event because I was invited, and felt compelled to stand in solidarity for what was happening back home in America.
The primary mode of communication I had for this event was through a Facebook event page. It was organized by a few people (they were the administers of the event page) and they informed us of the schedule and logistics of the demonstration during the hours leading up to the event.
Because this is a demonstration, some of the characteristics that we talked about in class that stood out immediately for me were “promoting good, preventing evil,” activist, and public. However, I felt like this event was lacking in mutual assistance. I understand that for big organized events like these there inevitably are leaders and organizers. However, when they posted photos of the signs that we should hold up during the demonstrations, a question that came across my mind was why they didn’t allow us to contribute as well to making signs. I believe my questions comes from a reciprocal perspective, and I had wanted to feel more integral to this event than just a random individual who went for the sake of it. From the organizers’ perspective, I feel like this mutual assistance would have greatly helped them as well as they were given the responsibility of creating signs and contacting news channels and updating Facebook at the same time. Through an event as grassrooted as a demonstration, it seemed to me that they didn’t take advantage of how willing a lot of people were in helping towards make this event happen.
Thoughts 2/21
“Reflect on a time when you were part of an event (on the Internet) that was trying to establish social capital. Given our class discussion, how do you think that event could’ve been improved or gone better?”
The most recent social capital event that I remember partly participating online for was a #blacklivesmatter protest in Paris when I was studying abroad there last quarter. I heard about the event because I was invited, and felt compelled to stand in solidarity for what was happening back home in America.
The primary mode of communication I had for this event was through a Facebook event page. It was organized by a few people (they were the administers of the event page) and they informed us of the schedule and logistics of the demonstration during the hours leading up to the event.
Because this is a demonstration, some of the characteristics that we talked about in class that stood out immediately for me were “promoting good, preventing evil,” activist, and public. However, I felt like this event was lacking in mutual assistance. I understand that for big organized events like these there inevitably are leaders and organizers. However, when they posted photos of the signs that we should hold up during the demonstrations, a question that came across my mind was why they didn’t allow us to contribute as well to making signs. I believe my questions comes from a reciprocal perspective, and I had wanted to feel more integral to this event than just a random individual who went for the sake of it. From the organizers’ perspective, I feel like this mutual assistance would have greatly helped them as well as they were given the responsibility of creating signs and contacting news channels and updating Facebook at the same time. Through an event as grassrooted as a demonstration, it seemed to me that they didn’t take advantage of how willing a lot of people were in helping towards make this event happen.
Comment on COLLO and Social Capital by Betty Hancock
Hi Luke. I’m curious about COLLO because this is the first time I’ve heard about it. How many students are on COLLO? How active are most of the members? I’d love to hear more about how the typical user is able to leverage the community for social capital.
Comment on The place to think… by Betty Hancock
I agree that much of our reputations are based on our online representations, but this adds so much pressure! One can afford a bad first impression or an awkward comment in the real world, because with time and distance, we can prove that we’re better than a poor first impression or that one comment wasn’t a true representation of our thoughts/feelings. People forget about the details and move on. Online though, things are a completely different story. Everything is permanent! We can’t afford to make any single mistakes, post a single bad photo, or get into one overly heated/harsh fight on Facebook. Everything we do is there for the world to see and relive whenever they want!
Reading Response: Peter Kollok’s “The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace”
In this article, Peter Kollock discussed the ways in which the Internet has developed an economy of cooperation and mutual assistance. He walked through several examples of online public goods, including the collaborative development of Linux, and he discussed the ways in which the Internet changes the traditional costs and benefits of participation.
One thing that stuck out to me in particular in this article was Kollock’s claim that “online interaction can reduce the costs of contributing to the production of a public good in numerous ways. Consider, for example, collective protest designed to change the policy of an organization. Even if one believes in the goals of the protest, the temptation is to let others do the work and avoid even such small costs of composing and sending off a letter of protest. To the extent costs are lowered, the more likely it is that individuals will take part in the collective action.”
While I think online communication definitely lowers the barrier to entry for collective action, I think it makes it harder for passion to translate into action. It’s so easy to like a post or share a comment or spread awareness online, but it’s hard to get this action to translate into anything else– any real world commitment to change. For example, the Kony 2012 video spread like wildfire online, but the real world Kony 2012 protests weren’t well attended and very few of the people who shared the Kony 2012 video gave much thought to the cause 2 months later. It’s so easy to spread awareness about a cause online, but because information spreads so easily and there’s a wealth of information, it’s can be really hard to use the internet to promote real world action. Agree or disagree?
