Are Social Media exploiting our Social Capital?
Human beings have always felt the need to share with one another. What is meant by the term sharing is the communication between one another, sharing things in common and interests as well as the invitation to participate in certain activities. This helps us create bonds and connect with certain people which is a kind of fundamental need for human beings (Fuchs, 2014). Sharing is an important aspect of society, it has been maintained through history not only because of the need of connectedness but also because of the fact that we as humans expect each other to share. Sharing therefore becomes a measure of a person’s qualities and effectiveness in general, it involves people in society and moves it. This provides several benefits, since when people share they become more connected and therefore become more trustworthy; their value and influence in society increases. These benefits can be considered as social capital since they increase a person’s value in society and connects them to others. Through sharing, people develop their trustworthiness, they are considered friendlier and therefore start building connections which can improve their social standing. Also, for society, trust, friendship and collaboration helps it advance.
Today, social media altered how and how much we share. With the rise of social media came the alteration of sharing. Social media has become a necessary tool to share and communicate with others; since it facilitated this sort of communication between people, it became so necessary that not being on social media can alienate them from society (Kenedy, 2013). Friendship and relationships gained a new definition in our era; it isn’t necessary to see a person face to face or even have a conversation to be friends with them, we just add them on Facebook and we will get to know each other by what we post. Also, sharing has become some sort of competition to some people (Busher, 2015); they need to share certain aspects of their lives and feel the need to compare themselves to others which creates competition instead of friendship and connectedness. In addition, when it comes to trust, social media has lessened the trust between people in some cases. For example, after all the stories we’ve heard about people impersonating others on dating sites it is more difficult to trust the people we communicate with on them. Yet there are many advantages to social media. Since these tools helped us connect and communicate more easily, they help people feel like they are part of a community even if they are a minority as well as help these communities speak up and take action on what they think is right or wrong; the Arab spring for example, wouldn’t have happened without the immediacy and availability of information and communication (Giddens, 2013). Yet unfortunately these tools are not available to everyone and many are not being able to use them in a way they reinforce social classes; we can give the example of free basics, which gives limited access to the internet to people who can’t afford it, which basically is a control of what we can and can’t access or share, while collecting information about what people search for.
This brings us to the issue of how social media platforms are collecting our information and using our social capital. It has been uncovered for a while now that some social media platforms are using our social capital which is utilized by advertising (or other) companies, who are becoming huge beneficiaries of this relatively new way of sharing. Also, this collection of information helps algorithms put forward what they think we are interested in sharing or receiving.
Having all of our information, beliefs, likes and dislikes shared on social media, platforms have developed algorithms that keeps information that would be relevant to us and our beliefs on the first page of our platforms.
Algorithms work in way of what information they choose to exclude (Gillespie, 2012). This is in a way giving us the illusion of control on what we share or like. In addition to this, social media platforms usually have community guidelines which includes the rules of what we can and can’t share on social media; those rules can sometimes be too strict and can silence some opinions of society by reinforcing the norms.
By agreeing to the terms and conditions set by certain platforms, we are legitimizing the usage of our social capital. Yet, as stated previously, in our present day, we might be alienated from society by not adhering to these terms and conditions and joining these platforms. These conflicting interests need to be addressed; are we not the owners of our social capital as much as the music industry is the owner of the music they produce? If we do not have monetary gain on our social capital, it isn’t considered stealing and makes it okay to utilize them for that? With new societies come new rules, since society is changing, new laws are being and should be instated in order to help society progress.
References:
Bucher, T. (2015) ‘Networking, or What the Social Means in Social Media’, Social Media + Society
Fuchs (2014) ‘What is Social media’ in Social Media: A Critical Introduction, London, Sage.
Giddens, A., & Sutton, P. W. (2013). Organisations and Networks. In Sociology(7th ed., pp. 854–861). Polity Press.
Gillespie, T. (2012). The Relevance of Algorithms. P. Boczkowski, K. Foot & T. Gillespie (eds.), In Media Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kenedy (2013) ‘Rhetorics of Sharing’ in Loving, G & Rasch M. Unlike Us. Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives, Institute for Network Culture, Amsterdam.
