Better Together<\/a>, and this week we’re talking about the Introduction, and then if that goes well, Chapter One. So, how did y’all like it?\nIn general, I like the emphasis on storytelling, both as a means of disseminating information about social capital, and as an aspect of social capital itself. Of course, I believe in stories; I think that the stories we share are social capital. The ‘norms of reciprocity’ really are just people acting how they think they are supposed to act, and we learn how we are supposed to act from stories. Anyway, here are some questions to start with.\n
Does it bug any of you that they don’t really define social capital? From the website, “Social capital refers to the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].”\n
The difference between bonding and bridging social capital (p. 2) is important, and I’m not sure it is as simple as they makes it seem. I’m not even sure what he means by ‘inward-looking’ and ‘outward-looking’. I think this has to do with Granovetter and weak ties. But then, is social capital about making weak ties or strong ones?\n
“Beginning, roughly speaking, in the late 1960s, Americans in massive numbers began to join less, trust less, give less, vote less, and shmooze less.” (p. 4) Is this connected with the Miss Manners idea about the death of politeness due to the fetishization of honesty? Do people trust less because they value truth more? Is social capital about being phony?\n
Background question: is the attempt to create social capital inherently self-defeating? When people were Elks (I’ll have to use that phrase again), nobody knew it was good for the country. If we’re trying like hell to make a ‘joiner’ culture, will we drive the positive aspects of the groups away, leaving ourselves with the conformism but not the reciprocities?\n\n
,
-Vardibidian.\n\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi, come on in. There are plenty of virtual chairs, and even virtual floor pillows for the young and flexible. The virtual kettle is on, and we have virtual tea and virtual hot chocolate, but I\u2019m afraid we only have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17081,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions\/17081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}