I’ve been browsing the internet for a little while to see if anybody used Bourdieu’s notion of social capital as a framework for the analysis of social software such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn (the latter being particularly representative). I apologise in advance to purists that may think that I oversimplify Bourdieu, but it seems to me that social capital works a bit like this: Bourdieu extended the (Marxist?) notion of capital, and introduced concepts such as social capital, economic capital, cultural capital, etc. The value of particular types of capital changes according to the context within which it is used: for example, cultural or ‘intellectual’ could be considered as particularly important for people in research. Furthermore, these people are in a position allowing them to convert this intellectual capital into economic capital (giving lectures being an example of such a ‘conversion mechanism’).
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\nI agree that it makes little sense to isolate one particular Bourdieusian concept to apply it to the analysis of social software, but considering the question with the help of the whole Bourdieusian theoretical framework could only be more beneficial to our cause: You are more than welcome to check all this out on Wikipedia!
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\nHow, then, can the notion of social capital be used for the analysis of social software? If we go back to the amazingly clear example I provided above, we can start thinking about how this would work for an analysis of LinkedIn: Even though having a lot of contacts can be considered beneficial as a form of social capital, what really is important for the people using such services is the means they have to convert this social capital into the type of capital they are interested in (although it would be quite naive to think that most of the time the desired ‘end product’ is economic capital).
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\nI imagine there is much more to it, but it seems to me that straight away such notions can really help in providing a solid framework within which the use (and therefore the design) of social software can be analysed. I welcome all critiques, even harsh! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been browsing the internet for a little while to see if anybody used Bourdieu’s notion of social capital as a framework for the analysis of social software such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn (the latter being particularly representative). I apologise in advance to purists that may think that I oversimplify Bourdieu, but it seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,1],"tags":[32,26,35,34,13,5,33],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practice","category-theory","tag-bourdieu","tag-method","tag-social-capital","tag-social-sofware","tag-social-theory","tag-software-development-methodologies","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/belouin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}