Social Capital In = Social Capital Out?

Social Capital is a concept that will be familiar to many youth and community workers. Online Social Networks can be seen as tools that support individuals to develop both their bridging and bonding social capital resources. Using social networks to share media, communicate, collaborate and articulate relationships can intensify young people's interactions and depth of bonding with friends. Using a social network to keep in touch with aquaintences, or to get introduced to friends-of-a-friend can help an individual develop a useful 'stock' of bridging social captital.

However, as Nick Booth notes in his write up from the Big Debate on Digital Utopia in Birmingham yesterday - individuals existing social connections and social capital also influence how likely they are to engage with the social web.

We can’t bridge the digital divide simply by providing internet access. Stepping across that divide comes when people use the internet to strengthen their social network and enrich their stock of social capital.

...Earlier today Jo Geary clearly made the point that the digital divide is not simply about acess to technology. Loads of people have access to the internet, but choose to use it rarely or not at all.

...To my mind the digital divide is much like the economic divide between work and worklessness. If someone has been out of work for a long time it may well be a question of getting them into the flow of new networks, connections that can give them the confidence and the information to find and keep a job.

To step higher up the work chain is again often connected to connections. Strengthening your network to gain greater access to ideas, intelligence, support and encouragement can make the critical difference between being led and becoming a leader. To do this people will often benefit from a mentor or a sponsor, someone in their existing network who’ll get them across the bossed and boss divide.

One of the challenges for youth work is to help mentor and sponsor young people in finding positive networks that they can be part of - and to assist excluded young people in making positive use of ever-more-important networking tools in order to ensure they're not the wrong side of a growing social-networking, and social capital, divide.