SOCIAL CAPITAL BLOG
These are the periodic musings, generally social capital-related but not always, of Thomas Sander, Executive Director of the Saguaro Seminar. We will also provide Saguaro programmatic updates and reports of other interesting data, research,or developments.
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May 14, 2007
Promise and peril of neighborhood listserves
Are you being listserved? (Financial Times, 5/11/07, Holly Yeager) on the social capital impact of listserves, including quotes from Keith Hampton about their general effectiveness. [Results from Keith's e-neighbors experiment on this topic will be printed in Neighborhoods in the Network Society: The e-Neighbors Study. (forthcoming). Information, Communication and Society 10(5). ]
For sure, localized electronic networks are usually more powerful than geographically-distant e-networks since they are more likely to be supplemented by or buttressed by real face-to-face encounters. That said, the story highlights one listserve disaster in NYC where the building's residents used e-mail as an excuse to say highly uncivil things to their neighbors that they would never say face-to-face.
What is your experience?
If you're interested in starting a neighborhood listserve, i-neighbors is one way of doing this.
May 11, 2007
Neurological basis of morality
"Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain's Wiring" (WSJ, 5/10/07, Science Journal, Robert Lee Hotz) Describes a recent experiment of neuroscientists at Harvard, Caltech and the University of Southern California that uncovered why most of us have an intuitive sense of right or wrong, i.e., because there is a neural wiring that produces moral judgment. If certain brain cells were knocked out with an aneurysm or a tumor, the ability to think clearly about some issues of right and wrong was permanently skewed. These subject had injured an area, located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex several inches behind the brow , that links emotion to cognition. "When that influence [the role played by unconscious empathy and emotion] is missing," said USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, "pure reason is set free." See also, Moral Judgement Fails Without Feelings (USC, May 2007).
May 11, 2007
YouTube Election: Increasing citizens' power as producers and via their social capital
The YouTube Election (Vanity Fair, June 2007, James Wolcott) discusses how YouTube is likely to change the 2008 presidential election. YouTube increases the power of individuals -- to produce news rather than consume it in election and to spread important videos via social capital to their friends.
The article discusses videos that have widely circulated on YouTube of candidates. Examples of this are the anti-Hillary Clinton ad that spoofs the original introduction of the Apple Computer; in this version, created by a Barack Obama supporter, a courageous individual hurls an object at a giant Jumbotron screen playing a sound clip of Hillary-babble. Other examples where YouTube highlights gaffes of candidates are Hillary's horrendously off-key singing of the national anthem, George Allen's macaca moment, Joe Biden claiming that only Indians can go to 7-11s, George Bush kissing Joe Lieberman (which Lieberman's campaign opponent, Ned Lamont, exploited to tie Lieberman to Bush), etc.
The power of such YouTube videos is that they can spread powerfully and quickly through watchers' social networks (electronic and word of mouth). The downside is that it increases the chance that ANY gaffe gets circulated widely. If that gaffe reveals the secret and true, unscripted candidate, it may be a good thing; if it simply rewards robo-candidates that are controlled enough or lucky enough not to slip up, it may be a bad thing.
Ironically, the YouTube factor may work to try to make candidates MORE controlled and artificial rather than less since they fear that unscripted moments that turn out badly are likely to gain wide circulation.
May 11, 2007
Longitudinal data on AmeriCorps participants available
The Corporation for National and Community Service announced the public release of longitudinal datasets from Serving Country and Community: A Longitudinal Study of Service in AmeriCorps. The datasets follow over 4,000 AmeriCorps members and individuals from 1999-2003 compared to non-participants. The datasets contain over 1,200 variables, covering education, employment, civic engagement, life skills, and demographics. To obtain the data files, please e-mail the Corporation for National and Community Service, Office of Research and Policy Development..
May 10, 2007
ServeNext and more universal national service .
ServeNext was launched in the Spring of 2007 to be a political advocacy organization for more universal national service in the United States. At the Saguaro Seminar, we believe that both research and common sense supports the notion that broader-scale national service could be very effective at three goals:
1) cultivating the spark of increased political engagement we see among 18-25 year olds today;
2) helping to build more cross-class solidarity at a time when the gaps between rich and poor are as great as they have ever been;
3) related to #2, building increased bridging social capital (as exemplified by the service group City Year), during a time when we increasingly live in more segregated communities and when our ethnic and racial diversity is almost inevitably and desirably increasing over the next 10-30 years.
ServeNext was mentioned in a 5/10/07 Boston Globe Editorial Service: a Corps Campaign Issue, which stated that:
"All of the presidential candidates will soon be asked to sign a pledge to more than double the size of AmeriCorps, from some 70,000 in a given year now to at least 170,000 by 2010. The effort is being coordinated by a new group, ServeNext.org, with the support of many advocates of public service. A unanimous or near-unanimous response from the candidates would help bridge the partisanship that divides American politics today, and inject an optimistic note into the campaign."
We hope that ServeNext succeeds in getting the candidates to commit to this and that the candidates follow through on this commitment.
May 7 , 2007
Life In The Network: Possibilities of dynamically monitoring .Fascinating talk by David Lazer at the Kennedy School of Government. He talked about how new computational power, and new digital traces of our comings/goings, communication, etc. is creating and can create vast data troves even on a minute-by-minute basis that can be mined to understand the structure of social networks at an individual or collective level (organization, town, etc.).
[Powerpoint available here. Videos of the presentation are available in two parts: part 1 and part 2.]
He highlighted 4 examples of such computational studies: 1) call log analysis; 2) instrumentation of human behavior; 3) natural language processing; and 4) virtual worlds.
Call Log Analysis: this study is summarized in National Academy of Sciences Proceeding paper with 4 international co-authors. They analyzed cellphone call log information over a 9 month period of a medium sized European country cellphone provider with 7 million users and 49 trillion directed dyadic relationships. [Picture of the network here.] Analysis of these data showed that it did exhibit scale-free, power law properties. It did not show "6 degrees of separation"; some nodes in the network were actually 13 degrees of separation away. And the network did not quite show the strength of weak ties; it looked more like dirt roads (infrequent communication) connected the hubs and then superhighways (very frequent communication) connected within the local clusters. Much as a road system constructed in this way would not facilitate the quick dissemination materials across the network, the structure of the social networks was suboptimal for information dissemination. They found in the cellphone network data that it was actually the moderate-frequency ties (rather than weak ties) that most enabled information to be shared (since the weak ties were too infrequent to get the information out.) [Lazer admitted that the cellphone log data said very little about the content of these relationships. A handyman might look like a hub of the network because he used a cellphone for his business and everyone with problems contacted him; or it couldn't differentiate a short actual call from a wrong number, etc.]
A second study "Revealing Social Relationships Using Contextual Proximity and Communication Data" (Lazer, with Nathan Eagle and Sandy Pentland) monitored about 100 MIT students over 9 months using call log data, locational proximity (bluetooth monitors that detected what other subjects of the study they were near and when) and self reports on proximity, friends and satisfaction. They found a substantial recency effect (subjects overweight who they've been near in the last 5 minutes rather over a longer-term basis) -- this suggests why background always-on monitors produce more reliable data. The subjects remembered proximity with reciprocal non-friends with 99.5% accuracy, but on reciprocal friends were only 35% accurate at reporting non-proximity (since one's mind infers that you must have been proximate the friend even if you weren't). Interestingly, the researchers were able to predict reciprocal non-friends and reciprocal friendships (just using phone call log data and proximity) with 95% accuracy. [They used elements like the frequency of phone calls, the proximity of A and B at home, the proximity of A and B at work, the proximity of A and B outside of work, the proximity of A and B on Sat. night, etc. ] And in some ways the call log and proximity data better captured the nuanced element of our social ties. For example, there is strong literature that shows the relation between social ties and life satisfaction. Interestingly, friendships inferred from the call log and proximity data better predicted life satisfaction than self-reported friendship data. [David Lazer has also very recently used sociometers, devices developed by the MIT Media Lab and hung like a badge around one's neck, that track things like the proximity of A and B, whether A or B is speaking and in what tone and modulation; whether A is facing B; the movements of A and B (standing, sitting, walking, etc.). Kennedy School of Government students wore these sociometers during the Spring public policy exercise and the data will be analyzed with Nancy Katz to determine the effectiveness of teams.]
A third study was on natural language analysis. Lazer was involved in a study analyzing the content of Congressional representatives' webpages. [Some of this project is summarized here.] These pages are all trying to do a similar thing: communicate to the constituents in a strategic way the representatives' positions on various issue that the representative thinks it is advantageous to emphasize. For the moment, they have merely tried to analyze the content of certain words or phrases and found using natural language processors that the presence of certain phrases on a House Members' website predict his/her party affiliation (more uses of "terror" in late 2001 was the best predictor of Republican affiliation and more uses of "Iraq" in 2006 was the best predictor of Democratic affiliation). In the future, they would like to use this to try to determine the dynamic evolution of these words or how they disseminate or what the social mapping is -- what words are how closely affiliated with what other words.
The final project that Lazer highlighted is natural experiments. So in his Connecting To Congress project with Kevin Esterling, Curt Ziniel and and Michael Neblo, they conducted 20 deliberative on-line sessions with Congressional members and their constituents. [A video presentation of this is available in two parts - part 1 and part 2]. Subjects engaged in pre-test and post-test surveys, follow-up surveys after the election to see how they voted, and demographics were known on all on-line participants. They could manipulate the features of this on-line discussion. They are analyzing these data but they did find that participation in these sessions for constituents was most frequent when they generally knew a lot about politics but not the specific topic of the on-line discussion. And they found that participation in the session had a big impact on a favorable view of their representative and their level of general political participation.
In summary, Lazer predicted that these technologies (and others like it) will have a quantum leap in orders of magnitude in what's known about human social behavior. And the use of these is likely to increase in an increasingly digitized environment and with increasing computational power to analyze such enormous datasets. Lazer thinks that sociologic academics have lived in a Flat World and we are just emerging to see new dimensions beyond the squares and triangles we have observed all our lives. We don't yet know what the new paradigms will be and how to effectively use the new dimension. But these technologies may permit us to observe properties like the evolution of social networks, or dynamically observe what predicts the spread of avian flu or a cold, or to see how an intervention or policy in real time changes social interaction in the way envisioned or an unexpected way.
Finally, Lazer cautioned that there are some clear obstacles. 1) overcoming academic silos -- social scientists and scientists and computer scientists are not used to collaborating but these data will require cross-silo collaboration; 2) we will need new infrastructures to gather and analyze these data; 3) there are substantial human subjects and privacy issues -- these data are most interesting the more one knows about the demographics of social network members and the content of their communications, but the more one knows about these, the less possible it is to protect the anonymity of people within these networks; 4) much of the data gathered is held by the government or private companies so there is much to be worked out about whether these data will be shared and under what conditions that don't violate privacy issues or give up corporation competitively prized information. Lazer thinks that this will require shifted paradigms, but we don't yet know what those paradigms will be.
Some questions that were generated included asking whether if we could effectively predict friendship using such information, could we predict things like power or influence in a network?
I said it reminded me of the early days of 'artificial intelligence.' There was much promise of what machines might be able to accomplish, but a sense of how crude the instruments were relative to the nuances of human thinking. Similarly here, while the network data is stunningly large, it is also blunt and simplistic, so depending on the data you may not be able to tell whether two people are talking, or what the content, or emotional level of the exchange is, or body language, or.... It may be that these things change over time and improve.
Nevertheless, I think the new data is quite interesting for understanding some of the dynamics of social networks that have always been studied in a static form (like looking at a one-time snapshot of a social network). For example, how do hubs form? Are the people who start to become hubs hubs because of power or extroversion? Are hubs more likely to initiate new ties with new friends or are those ties most likely to be initiated by others who want to be friends with that "hub." Do hubs do more to strengthen weak ties than others? Or many have commented that dyads tend to close into triads, in other words if A knows B and A knows C, B and C are more likely to become friends over time. Such dynamic networks might help explain how this happens (is it proximity, or shared interests, does A tend to close the loop or do B and C, what factors distinguish under what conditions dyads are likely to close into triads)? There are lots of other similarly interesting questions to this.
Moreover, such data could be valuable at the individual or organizational level to see if one could consciously strengthen a network, similar to what some call netweaving. One could imagine that analyzing the structure of an organization's networks could be really valuable at understanding that there need to be more links between cluster A and cluster B (where clusters might be defined by race or office location or functional group within an organization or age or educational background). And an organization might consciously try certain interventions to graft these ties through the structuring of work groups or social events or office location or... and then could monitor how effective this was at building and sustaining a link and increasing flows of information across these sociologic silos.
If you knew the races/ethnicities of folks in the network it would be interesting to understand whether building bridging links across race (or it could be across other dimensions) helps increase the number of bridges between two clusters. In other words assume A1 is in cluster A (largely composed of people like A) and forms a tie with B1 in cluster B (largely composed of people like B) or is encouraged to form a tie. Does this increasingly make it more likely that others in cluster A will form ties with others in cluster B and under what conditions.
Anyway, you get a flavor of the types of interesting questions raised by this talk.
Postscript:
There is also an interesting post by Ben Waber on the Kennedy School of Government Complexity blog on the instrumentation of human behavior-trying to discern human behavior like friendship from their proximity and call logs.
And The Economist in their April 28, 2007 edition has a special report on telecoms. And in one story called "The Hidden Revolution" (p. 58) they highlight that a patented technique of American Express enables the use of RFID chips to track the flow of people in public places from the RFID tags in their clothing and carried products. The Economist notes that they have "agreed not to use it without disclosing the fact, after pressure from privacy advocates." But already the article notes that "Prisons in America are experimenting with bracelets that have wireless chips embedded in them to keep track of inmates....Guards are also tagged, so prisoners may feel safer from abuse." They note that the new wireless communication will be virtually invisible to humans and the only sure bet is that how it will be used will surprise us."
April 30 , 2007
Phishers and Scammers Discover Social Capital.: Phishers increasingly prey on our lack of social connections and the importance we attach to social capital (following friends' recommendations and wanting to keep in touch with them), like this recent e-mail with the title Someone Who Cares About You and the following content:
' Hi friend ! You have just received a postcard from someone who cares about you! This is a part of the message: "Hy [notice the telltale misspelling] there! It has been a long time since I haven't heared about you [notice the telltale ungrammatical phrasing and misspelling]! I've just found out about this service from Claire, a friend of mine who also told me that..."'
E-mail goes on to say "If you'd like to see the rest of the message click -> here <- [hyperlink to nefarious site] to receive your animated postcard!". And e-mail then purports to come from a reputable site (www.postcard.com).
So even if you're an exemplar of social capital and think most people can be trusted, it proves that due to the bad guys being able to widely disperse their messages, you can't check your distrust at the door.
April 29, 2007
We applaud the Deval Patrick Administration for their attention to civic engagement and a task force that has been meeting to help implement this vision. On May 21, 2007 a Civics on the Hill Summit will be held to expose young people to civics and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts government. Read more about it here.
April 23, 2007
GoLoco.org has attempted to combine social networking software, and a new focus on environmentalism in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth. It helps friends neighbors and strangers arrange carpooling trips, and allocates both the cost and the carbon dioxide emissions. Let's hope for environmental and social capital reasons they succeed.
April 19, 2007
A recent Washington Post story reported on declining health among retiring Boomers [Baby Boomers Appear Less Healthy Than Parents (Washington Post, 4/20/07, p. A1, Rob Stein) ] The story doesn't discuss social capital but these results are consistent with what one would expect given connection between SK and health and lower SK of Boomers relative to Long Civic Generation.it is something that I and Bob Putnam have written about earlier and may be the canary in the coal mine. It certainly will have dire economic implications if Boomers' worse health relative to the previous generation persists over the next 10-15 years.
April 18, 2007
My first blog entry concerns a fascinating story called Pearls Before Breakfast: can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out (Washington Post, 4/8/07, p. w10, Gene Weingarten) The story is not about social capital per se, indirectly about the cocoons that we live in such that 1000 commuters in Washington, DC, almost without exception, didn't hear or stop to listen to the sublime beauty of violin virtuoso Joshua Bell who was busking in the Washington Metro as an experiment. One has to assume that these cocoons affect not only hearing Joshua Bell but also our ability to connect with friends and strangers.
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