Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs and Collective Action Among Strangers

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Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs and
Collective Action Among Strangers

• By Paul Resnick, 2004

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Agenda

• Case Definitions
• ICTs
• What can ICTs support?
• Progression of ICTs
• Areas Ripe for Transformation
• News Monitoring and Opinion Formation
• Grassroots politics
• Semi-public transportation
• Conclusion

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Case Definitions

• Capital a resource that can be accumulated and
  whose availability allows people to create value
  for themselves or others.
• Physical capital buildings and tools
• Financial capital money allowing people to
  acquire resources
• Social capital productive resources that inhere
  in social relations can facilitate useful
  interactions among people
• Impersonal social capital social resources not
  based on personal connections at all (I.e.
  Shared knowledge, shared values, price signals,
  monitoring and sanctioning systems)
• Sociotechnical capital - Productive resources
  that inhere in patterns of social relations that
  are maintained with the support of information
  and communication technologies (ICTs).

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ICTs

• Information and communication technologies
• Recommender systems
• Introducer systems
• Reputation systems
• Can be used to support personal relationships
• Bridge time and distance
• Useful in supporting impersonal forms of social
  capital where affective ties are not needed

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What can ICTs support?

• Computers can search, sort and select on the
  basis of geographic coordinates
• Might enable people to make connections within
  their neighborhood without ever knowing the
  people down the street (I.e. www.UpMyStreet.com)
• Taste Matching or recommendation sharing among
  people who may not know each other or be
  explicitly aware of each others interests
• People can get personalized recommendations from
  each other without ever establishing a personal
  relationship (I.e. www.amazon.com)
• Behavior monitoring that gathers information
  about peoples past behavior and makes it
  available to others
• Can enable the maintenance of trust in a large
  online interaction environment Past reputations
  are somewhat informative in predicting future
  problems (I.e. www.ebay.com)

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Progression of ICTs

• Income effect an increase in how much the
  function is performed overall because that
  function has become less expensive relative to
  other goods in the economy
• Same framework is used to help us understand and
  perhaps foresee potential impacts of
  technologically-mediated forms of impersonal
  social capital

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Areas Ripe for Transformation

• A Substitution of impersonal sociotechnical
  capital for forms of impersonal social capital
  that do not rely on technology
• Ebays reputation system is a partial substitute
  for legal enforcement of fair trade
• Private, electronically-mediated dispute
  resolution services such as Square Trade
  partially substitute for legal adjudication at
  substantially lower costs
• Instead of markets we see the emergence of barter
  systems with computers maintaining accounts to
  ensure equitable patters of exchange over time
• Instead of long-lived organizations with clear
  external boundaries and internal roles, we see ad
  hoc groups using ICTs to organize their efforts
  in areas such as technology standard setting,
  software development

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Areas Ripe for Transformation

• Income effect, should lead to more reliance on
  impersonal social capital of all kinds,
  technologically mediated or not
• While personal connections are still available,
  computerized matching services are gaining
  prominence both for job placement (monster.com)
  and for dating (match.com)
• When choosing media, restaurants, products,
  people are turning to the word of mouse of
  strangers on sites like amazon.com and
  epinions.com, and not just the word of mouth of
  their friends

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Areas Ripe for Transformation

• Emergence of new institutional structures and
  ways of life that would have been impractical
  without impersonal sociotechnical capital
• News Monitoring and Opinion Formation
• Grassroots Politics
• Semi-public Transportation

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News Monitoring and Opinion Formation

• Internet has broken the mass medias near
  monopoly on publishing information about current
  events
• Still some concerns about accuracy and validity
• Recommender systems are helping with this
• If a large number or readers begin to depend on
  these distributed recommending processes, the
  levers of influence for shaping public opinion
  will shift considerably

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Grassroots Politics

• Electoral politics more reliance on impersonal
  social capital and less on mass media, mass
  mailings or endorsements from prominent
  individuals
• October 2003 70,000 people reportedly attended
  simultaneous informal events for Howard Dean/
  venue selection made by attendees themselves,
  coordinated through meetup.com
• Rather than old-style ward organization (where
  favors are traded among people who have
  established loyalties), we should expect to see a
  looser network, with information sharing and
  mobilization of coordinated action mediated by
  ICTS
• Moveon.org once people are joined, personal
  connections are not critical to any of the forms
  of participation

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Semi-public Transportation

• Ride Sharing
• Tremendous amount of unused transportation in
  unoccupied seats in private vehicles. Filling
  these seats would reduce smog, congestion and
  fuel consumption and might also create
  opportunities for increasing local social capital
  as people conversed in the car
• Barriers coordination of routes and schedules,
  safety risks, social discomfort with sharing
  private spaces and an imbalance of costs and
  benefits among the effected parties
• Use of technology-based monitoring and reputation
  systems could reduce some of the trust problems
• Computers could authenticate drivers and riders
• Deviations from expected routes could trigger
  phone calls to confrim nothing had gone wrong
• Technology could be used to coordinate the
  matching of rides to riders
• Impersonal sociotechnical capital may lead to a
  system of semi-public transportation in private
  vehicles that replaces public transportation
  entirely

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Conclusion

• Mediated communication displaces, substitutes for
  and complements face-to-face interactions
• Larger structural transformations in society are
  likely to arise from new forms of organized
  interaction among strangers that ICTs can enable
• These transformations are not inevitable and may
  not even be good for society
• It is worth while to try and anticipate where
  they might occur