Are Facebook and data tracking companies exploiting our social capital?
Social capital refers to the collective value of all “social networks” and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other “norms of reciprocity”. For the purpose of simplicity, we can consider social capital as the connections, shared qualities and understandings in the public arena that empower people and gatherings to trust one another thus cooperate. The social capital includes helpful informal organizations, a feeling of shared commitment, reliability, and comprehension of the standards overseeing compelling conduct and all other social assets that permit individuals to work successfully.
We realize that great social capital has a tremendous improvement potential, decidedly affecting monetary development, popular government, subjective advancement, and reception of cultivating practices, among others.
As the Internet structures and touches more lives, our relationship to it turns into a depending expression of our own and social qualities, and an essential open door for both individual and social change.
how did online networking change its function and meaning?
Online networking systems were portrayed by a gigantic advancement in the most recent two decades. Facebook, twitter, instagram were a mean of association between individuals, a mean of sharing their thoughts and perspectives and for the most part to express themselves freely.
Facebook’s social chart is the biggest social network dataset on the planet (starting 2010). It contains the biggest number of characterized connections between the biggest number of individuals among all sites.
We can’t deny the way that online networking changed the capacity and the significance of the social capital. The principle capacity of the social capital is to associate between individuals in an equal recipient way. However, with the development of the online networking systems individuals are presently associated “artificially”. The pattern now on these systems is sharing a photo, a post about our regular life, encounters, and so on…
If we analyze this topic closely, we understand that Like Economy and information trackers are changing our social relations into benefit and market power.
Like economy is an idea authored by Geertz and Helmond in 2013.
It Refers to the base that permits the trading of information, activity, influences, associations, and cash, intervened through Social Plugins, for example, the “like button “ (Geerlitz and Helmond, 2013. p 1353) is a powerful cookie that gives unique identifications and remembers the stores users go into which gets linked to what Facebook already has as profiling; and the value of the like button goes beyond its function of expressing admiration towards a picture or a post for example; its importance lies in what it subsequently leads to.
Social networking sites such as Facebook have arrived in a position to control what is distributed by setting up the Like button, for instance, as a definitive measure for ubiquity and accomplishment of substance offered by outsider destinations. So we can say that the fundamental capacity of online networking these days is to “classify” individuals and recognize them in view of their fame. There is rivalry rather than beneficial reciprocity.
Facebook today is a true empire. Facebook’s social chart is the biggest social network dataset on the planet (starting 2010). Facebook’s social diagram is claimed by the organization and is not imparted to different administrations. The Like Button and the Social graph permit Facebook to consolidation two already detached information sources (activity inside FB and outside of it) empowering new bits of knowledge and behavioral profiles for promoting organizations in genuine — time.
So it is the organizations who advantage the most from the knowledge and skills that we produce through our social relations online and from all our exercises.
More than 2 billion posts are liked or commented on per day (Facebook Statistics, 2011)
And the total number of likes since its launch in 2009 amounts to 1.13 trillion! (Zuckerberg, 2012).
To wrap up, it is troubling how capable Facebook has ended up because of the measures of data it has about every single user. In any case, rest guaranteed, “there are limits to Facebook’s enclosure of sociality.” (Geerlitz and Helmond, 2013, pp.1362) So this “phenomenon” of imbalance can be perilous, yet isn’t as over the top as it is embarked to appear. Thanks to the notifications, one is now able to block trackers, advertisers or analytics with the click of a button in order to attain a more even distribution of benefits and losses.
