I’m pretty into fantasy football myself, I’ve only played for two years but I think it’s really interesting from a competition with friends standpoint and from a cultural one. I’m not sure if you’ve read any of Matthew Berry’s blog posts or his book, but he discusses how fantasy impacts real life, from forming bonds across social and cultural barriers among strangers, to creating cohesion and friendships in the workplace, to bridging otherwise difficult relationships with friends or family/community members. I think the league-based format of the game establishes norms of trust and reciprocity among league mates and the game provides a common ground for people everywhere. League members are also somewhat civically engaged, discussing rule changes and other issues among themselves and with an elected commissioner…

Steven Johnson’s video, “Where do good ideas come from?” is remarkably simplistic description of the criteria you need in order to create a space that cultures innovation. He also dispels the myth of great overnight ideas. Great ideas takes time to mature and develop. He describes great ideas forming in “slow hunches,” or incomplete ideas, that come together over long periods of time. He mentions that Tim Berners Lee, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, took ten years to come up with his masterful idea. Timing is a key factor, but Johnson focused mainly on the space or environment where innovation takes place. He describes a space where “slow hunches” collide against each other is where innovation happens. A place that facilitates the exchange of ideas, so that they can be transformed/combined to form the brilliant ideas that impact our lives. He illustrates that by making a place where “hunches” are constantly colliding into each other fosters innovation and furthers knowledge.

This common space where ideas can be easily shared and compared against other ideas is today’s modern web. This ability to exchange ideas has altered the way we live and communicate. Johnson states that connectivity promotes innovation. “The chance favors the connected mind.”

But this also places an importance on cultivating your personal social capital. Our social capital is more important to us than ever before because more and more of our lives is becoming digital. Our social capital is, at times, the first and only representation of ourselves. It is odd to think that we are not representing ourselves, but we are through the relationships we choose to cultivate and through our reputations. The Wikipedia definition of reputation is “Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria.” Social evaluation has never been easier because of the affordances of today’s web. This key component shifts more significance towards your history, background, and social relationships.

Reputations are a cliché thought when discussed in a traditional sense. I mean by traditional sense of what it meant to a high school student who just wanted to be cool enough to not be bullied. But now, I think our reputation is an even more vital part to our identity. Social media has changed how we meet people. Before, we knew nothing about the person we were about to meet if they were a stranger. We might have seen a picture or heard a kind (unkind) word about the person. With today’s powerful and convenient technology, we can sit in a coffee shop and basically find out a large majority of a stranger’s personal information. Since this has become a norm, our reputation takes the lead in our identity in many cases. Although this has been true for quite some time now, a large part of our headline news is about a celebrity or political leader damaging their online reputation. In November, President Obama delivered one of his annual Thanksgiving speeches and his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, accompanied him to the event. Obviously, any event that involves the President is a global event, so that is just amplified on social media. Apparently, a comment or two was made about the President’s daughters during this event on Facebook.

Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for Republican Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, had said via a Facebook post that Obama’s daughters, Malia, 16, and Sasha, 13, needed to show “a little class,” complaining they appeared to look uninterested last week during an appearance with their father at a White House pre-Thanksgiving ceremony at which he had “pardoned” a turkey.

The article (link at bottom) continues to describe the outburst the comments caused and that she “resigned” the next day. This an extreme example, but demonstrates the significance of our social interactions online that affect our social capital and reputation.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/congressional-aide-resign-criticizing-obama-children-report-160258746.html

Reflect on a time you were a part of an online event that was trying to establish social capital. How could this event been improved?

An example that came to mind is fantasy football. This example is trivial, but is a simple example of an online event where you are trying to establish social capital. Most fantasy football leagues are conducted online for the most part. Most adults or even college students do not have time to meet every week to discuss rosters or injury reports. This is done completely online and for the few fantasy football online meeting rooms, the interfaces are impressive and quite extensive if you consider their purpose.

The specific event that each participant must establish social capital would be the initial draft before the league begins. This online event each of the participants must come up with a team name, potential style of offense and defense, past fantasy league experience, most current record, and other optional notes. Some of the optional notes that I have seen have included former or present playing experience, sport knowledge event awards, and any other accolade that would establish them as a threatening player. I did not participate fully partly because I had no idea the profiles would be so extensive and so competitive. Although the draft is normally random or based on past rules, during the season trades are allowed and this is where player’s profiles come into play. If your profile looks unimpressive a player may not consider doing a player transaction with you. Also, higher level more experience players have establish a recognizable relationships with certain players and league administrators. This all influences the success of the player in the league.

Although fantasy football leagues are insignificant in the grand scheme of life, they illustrate how people and platforms plan to establish an online presence and social capital. The social capital from online fantasy leagues may not carry over into the real world, but it does illustrate how a person’s social capital can be utilized and managed. It is also a prime example of network capital. Manuel Acevedo discusses this network capital in “Network Capital: an Expression of Social Capital in a Network Society:”

“When the interaction takes place among members of an electronic network, which are likely loosely-knit in geographic terms, the resulting social capital is network based. Network capital could then be understood as a measure of the differentiated value in the Information Age that communities structured as social networks generate on the basis of electronic (digital) networks for themselves, for others and for society as a whole.”

Loosely-knit networks is an accurate description of fantasy football leagues. Yes, many of players are friends, but many are friends of friends of co-workers and so forth. The network is tightly knit in some areas, but not throughout. Manuel Acevedo continues in explaining how network capital works:

“It is a result of cooperation via electronic networks, and in turn fosters the habit of such cooperation. This cooperation includes sharing of information and the use of computer-mediated-communications but it goes further towards group work, the creation of specific products, and the achievement of set objectives”

“It is created by communities of interest, where membership is based on personal interest, skills, background/experience and sharing of a common purpose. While network technologies allow for anyone in the world with Internet access to take part (in fact many virtual communities are geographically dispersed), physical proximity may be a factor as well.”

Network capital holds important potential for human development and specifically for development cooperation, where global and local issues mix fluidly in the processes leading to greater options for people and improved living conditions. The global citizen will have more possibilities to become involved in social causes, with lesser constraints of place or time.

Acevedo descriptions of network capital correlates with how online fantasy football leagues are coordinated. It is interesting to see how serious these leagues are and the amount of money you can win as a prize. Below is a link to a fantasy league’s money rules. As you can see, people are buying in large to compete for large money prizes at the end of the season!

http://fuzzysfantasyfootball.com/members/payouts.php

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?

As a co-founder of COLLO, a volunteer student organization dedicated to cultivating and facilitating an attitude of growth and collaboration among Stanford student artists, I am constantly trying to leverage the social capital of my networks and those of my fellow Stanford student artists. As the number of people who promotes a work of art increases, the viewership and growth compound exponentially and gives the artist significantly more exposure. This cross-promotion of works from using the Stanford artist community’s unofficial network to find other like-minded students with whom to collaborate. Making art is a process that naturally develops ‘norms of trust and reciprocity’, and therefore increases the social capital of both artists and the network as a whole.

There are many hindrances to the development of social capital among Stanford artists, namely, a lack of communal arts spaces, a lack of cross-disciplinary events, and a university culture that doesn’t necessarily value that arts highly, and is hyper entrepreneurial to the point where many artists see themselves as islands, forced to do everything themselves without the help of collaborators. These points are where COLLO seeks to jump in, providing Town Hall meetings about the arts at school, providing artist spotlights to showcase the fruits of students’ labor, and facilitating jam sessions and skill-share/workshops. These events are steps in the right direction, but there are many other things that still need to be done to remedy these issues. Overall we’d like to continue to develop a more collectivist mentality among artists and increase the number of volunteers to help out to get more people involved in the movement.

Examples of positive connection and collaboration between strangers working to accomplish tasks? Plenty at http://delicious.com/hrheingold/crowdsourcing a few:

http://goteo.org/about
https://plus.google.com/+EdChi/posts/ZXH7X55hnq5
http://irevolution.net/2012/08/22/crowdsourcing-disaster-response-iran/

What a wonderful video. I think these kinds of acts are representative of why Coke is so good at branding themselves. This is really how the internet should and could be used. I think we need more service that encourage positive connection and collaboration between strangers working to accomplish tasks. With the exception of the “Be My Eyes” app I wrote about earlier in this course, I’m struggling to come up with examples I’m having trouble finding any examples that both encourage communication between strangers and involve collaborating to solve problems. Any ideas?

Like Michelle mentioned, I think passwords are a strange example because a lot of companies and schools require you to constantly change your passwords often and they eventually go from sentimental to practical. Maybe that’s a metaphor for how our letters/long, heartfelt emails have transformed into practical, transaction-based messages.

I do like your point about remember the face. That’s one of Reddit’s official rules is to “remember the human” and I think is often forgotten about even on sites like Facebook where we know what the people we interact with look like and usually have met them.

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This week I was particularly intrigued by Steven Johnson’s summary of his book about where ideas come from. I found it particularly interesting that he destroys the myth of the epiphany with regards to innovation, instead referring to the public sphere as a tool for ideation through leveraging social capital. This social and network capital births ideas much more freely as a result of two or more long-time “hunches” meeting and intertwining.

This exact process provides the words I could never express to explain why I enjoy collaboration so much. I am full of half-ideas, especially with regards to music, but also within more “academic” and other creative fields and I much prefer riffing on the skills and ideas I don’t normally have access to than simply reaching around for ideas in my limited brain.

I would love to write more on this, and plan to soon, but it’s midnight after a long weekend running around the frozen tundra that is currently New York and I have a 7 AM plane to catch back to school in the morning, so the rest will have to wait..

yep, it’s so clear who are they genuine people, out to connect and collaborate and who are just looking to promote and burn every bridge they can and it’s all so obvious in the presentation.