Social Media and Social Ills

I haven’t written in this blog in a while because I started a new job as a search analyst about a month ago, and as you can imagine, that’s been taking up quite a bit of my time. Recently, however, I had an experience that has inspired me to write this post. I’ll get in to the details of the experience in a moment, but (as is my wont), I want to briefly go over some theory that relates directly to what I’m getting at first.

This post is really about social capital–the very real and practical value that we gain from our relationships with other people. The most obvious example of how social capital operates is in the job market: quite often, the people that you know determine the quality of job you can get. This is also true for university and professional school admissions: if your dad is best friends with the dean of admissions at a law school, your chances of admission are probably going to be better than they would be otherwise.

Social capital can also manifest itself in more subtle ways. Having a social network with experts in a variety of different fields can bring to your attention knowledge that would otherwise be hidden, for example. Or being closely related to an attorney can come in handy in all sorts of ways, including little things like having minor legal questions answered.

The importance of social capital is a major reason why Ivy League schools are so competitive; even if you could get a comparable formal education elsewhere, the connections that four years at Harvard or Yale afford you make these schools an exceptionally attractive choice. Social capital, in other words, is a major determinant of success in many, many spheres of life.

Unfortunately, it is also one of the major drivers of inequality. Much of our social capital is inherited — the schools we attend, the towns where we grow up, and the social standing of our parents determine, to a large extent, our social networks. If you grow up in a working class family and a working class town, you are almost certainly going to interact with other working class people. The value of your social network is probably going to be far, far less than that of your prep school peers.

It is precisely because of this difference that social mobility will almost always be limited, even when purely economic factors are taken into consideration. As long as people self-sort along class lines, making $80,000 a year while living in a blue collar social sphere will always be categorically different for yourself and your children than making $80,000 a year as an Ivy-educated lawyer.

So how does any of this relate to this post or blog? Well, that goes back to the story I mentioned in the beginning. A few weeks ago, I received a message on Facebook from an old college friend. As it turns out, he is now working for a firm that was in the market for SEO. He was wondering if my company might be a good match. As it turns out, we are, and it looks like his firm will be hiring us.

In this example, Facebook wasn’t just a way for him to contact me. He is a person that I haven’t spoken with in college, and I doubt I would have had any contact with him otherwise. Because of a status update I posted, he checked my profile and saw where I worked, then Googled my company, and realized that a business connection could be made.

It’s easy to view this story through the lens of social media evangelism. You could easily say that the lesson here is that new communication technologies enabled a connection that previously would not have existed. And that is undeniably true (thanks, Facebook!).

But to end the discussion there would be to ignore a troubling element of social media. Because the fact of the matter is that this connection was only possible because I happened to attend a particular college. And I only went to that college because of the high school I attended (my college was recommended by a full-time faculty member whose sole responsibility was matching students with colleges). In turn, I was only able to attend this (private) high school only because my parents were able to send me there, and so on.

The point of all of this is to suggest that social media is valuable as a tool for storing and extending existing social capital. Had that connection not existed before I got this job, I wouldn’t be writing this post. I got value from a social network site because I had established value in my social network. And the value in my social network was attributable to much more than my own efforts.

Of course, I only mentioned this story to illustrate this broader point. As we’ve seen with social network sites, people don’t primarily use social media (or more broadly, the internet) to make new connections. Instead, people use social media to extend and store existing social capital.

Thus, the value that people can gain from social media is a function of the value that exists in their social network. Given the disparity of social network value across class lines, this all suggests that social media will comfort the comfortable far more than the afflicted. It has the potential to exacerbate existing inequality.

To my eyes, that’s absolutely not a good thing.

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