Social Capital is the idea that there are certain shared values shared by a group or groups that allow them to pursue a common purpose. This idea is often used to explain why certain groups of people, particularly minorities, become successful in a society or a part of society, such as Jewish people being great lawyers. Developing out this, there seems to be an idea that Social Capital is not a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes, and is not something that can be conjured up out of thin air, being something that can only be developed in time by a closely connected, grassroots community. However, what does happens when Social Capital goes bad? What happens when a group uses Social Capital to reinforce their societal status over everyone else, or when a group uses Social Capital to be exclusionary and hateful?
Social Capital’s reinforcement of inequality can be easily seen in the phenomenon of the digital divide, which is essentially the information divide between those who have access to the internet and all its information and those who do not. The digital divide especially hits communities of color hard, and they are much less likely than white communities to have access to the internet, which is a direct result of inequitable Social Capital distribution because the digital divide can be addressed through policy proposals. Candidates for public office nowadays in Boston, such as David Halbert, support policy to increase equity by decreasing the digital divide. Social Capital going bad can be seen in other areas of the political arena, such as 71% of Congressional Staffers being White – the lowest it has ever been in recent history.
It seems like White communities often use their gained Social Capital to exclude others from receiving the same benefits that they do, such as African-Americans being barred from participating in certain unions, which helped numerous White families not fall into poverty in the 1900s. The more I learn about this topic, the harder it seems to find the silver lining, and while it seems like Social Capital can help uplift communities traditionally marginalized, it seems just as likely, if not more so, that Social Capital is used in a negative way to keep communities down instead of lifting them up.
However, it is not all negative, as throughout Journalism’s history, it seems clear that they have been gathering up their own social capital as trustworthy journalistic entities, with modern news stations enjoying the benefits of this process. Modern news outlets have the trust of the public (or at least did, for a long time) and therefore are harder to remove, allowing trustworthy news to continue to flow into the community. This is an area where social capital has gone less bad, but an area where it also seems to be eroding.
Journalism 2.0 