Social Capital

I will define that the concept of social capital raises before the development of social media. In my opinion, traditional media also can let people use their social capital to call on the public or spread some particular ideas. The only difference between traditional and social media is that social media create more opportunities for the public to build their own social capital. In the past, only those people who have high popularity on traditional media can have and use their social capital easily. Public or normal citizens have a rare chance to accumulate social capital. However, the situation totally changes since social media become more and more influential. Everyone who has social media is using these tools such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to accumulate social capital and execute their influence on many fields. We can simply regard the number of followers or the frequency of commenting as the symbol of social capital. If you have more followers or you accumulate fast and numerous reply from your followers, it means your contents on social media have more readers and concerns. Then you probably have more capacity for social capital.

In general, social capacity usually is used to call on people’s attention on specific political, environmental, and social issues and even convince the public to do something practical. Take Taylor Swift for example. She is a superstar and has an incredible high popularity. She has 1.2 hundred million followers on Instagram, so of course, we can see that she definitely has huge social influence and capital. At the midterm election in 2018, Taylor breaks her silence and first expresses her political preference. She got 2.1 million likes on that post. Three days after her expression post, there are 364 thousand new vote registrars in her state — Tennessee. Even though the candidate she supported didn’t win the election, the influence of her social capital is obvious in this example.