Lecture Note 1

Social Capital as a Concept in Human-Computer Interaction — From Bowling Together to Friend-sourcing

Written in 2016/10/8, Pittsburgh

The lecture introduced social capital as a concept in Human-Computer Interaction. It was held by Cliff Lampe, the associate professor from School of Information at the University of Michigan.

Cliff first made a brief introduction about what is social capital and how the concept of social capital developed throughout the history. He indicated that there are two directions to study social capital: structure and resource. To study social capital as a resource, one would focus more on the behaviors and efforts people put into generating a new relationship or making a relationship even stronger, while this process is less focused when the researcher sees social capital as a structure. However, both approaches focus on the structure, investment, and outcome.

An important point Cliff made is that physical capital, human capital and social capital all interact with each other. He then elaborated this point with the book Bowling Alone and the study of Facebook. From the experiment he carried out on Facebook, an interesting finding says that 4.4% of all public status updates in sample were mobilization requests, within which 47% of them are favor requests and 40% of them are opinion requests. This indicates that Facebook actually helps people to transfer social capital to physical capital or human capital.

In the end of the lecture, Cliff introduced Give & Get, a website that makes people’s social capital visible by showing different kinds of graphics and numbers, which I find very interesting. In my opinion, this could be a great way for people to realize the importance of the investment on social capital.

I think more opportunities lie not only in how people make use of their social capital and turn it into human or physical capital, but in making people realize the importance of social capital, which I didn’t fully realize before coming to this lecture. Seeing social network as a resource can make a difference in people’s thoughts, opinions, and behaviours, and it would be really excited to see more websites or mobile applications help people to do that.