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Social Capital Creation
Through Social Media
In a country
as diverse and complex as India is, a properly restructured and prioritized
social media can act as a catalyst for the creation of the social capital in
step with the creation of the economic capital, synergetically reinforcing each
other
Social media means different
things to different people. It can be used for hobby or as a serious and effective
business tool. Behind every organizational success story in this media is a lot
of patient planning and a sharp focus on getting things right – putting all the
right elements in the right way in the right place at the right time. Like any
other technology or facility, social media technology or facility too becomes
good or bad depending on how it is used. In this article we forecast the
evolutionary path likely up to the year 2020 for the ICT -ambience as well as
the social media shaped by it and show how the enhanced or new features of this
media can be well utilized to create social capital in the process of
socio-economic development of the country.
Evolution of ICT-Ambience For Social Media
Formal technology
forecast exercises carried out by the author in the past four years had
predicted the IT-ambience supporting the social media, among others, up to 2020
in terms of Converged Mobile Handset (CMH), Bandwidth Enablers, Fourth Generation
Long term Evolution (4G-LTE), Nanotechnology, web 3.0, Mobile Intelligent
Agents (MIA), Cloud Computing and Reusable Component Software. These are
briefly outlined below :
Converged Mobile Handset
By 2020 there will not be
a Personal Computer (PC) hardware industry as we know today. The evolution of Smartphone
and tablet is poised for a Convergence into a single ‘Converged Mobile Handset’,
which will incorporate in it full mobile phone functions as well as high end PC
compute functions. Asterisk type creative PBX will result in an open source telephony
platform which will be highly customizable with a wide compliance with
standards and include service features of voicemail, hosted conferencing,
call queuing and music on hold. This will be scalable from a few to a few
hundred phone users.
The compute power of a
high end PC will be actuated by callable apps depending on the problem environment
on hand. All the seven more important intrinsic features required for a ubiquitous
social media will be available: processing power, quality and power of
graphics, broadband multimedia, full internet access, content handling and
organizing capability, real time multimedia transaction ability, portability
and affordability.
Eventually every citizen
will own a CMH if we target for the use of ICT for evolution of a nationwide utilitarian
social media.
Bandwidth Enablers
While promoting a nationwide
social media, one of the technological hurdles encountered will be the availability
of bandwidth. First and foremost, economy of bandwidth utilization
requires a phased but sure transition from analog to digital, eventually
digitalizing every conceivable application touched by the network. The second imperative
will be the utilization of the bandwidth with least wastage. The third is the broad-basing
of the spectrum outside the essential defense spectrum. The fourth and more
difficult one to enforce is the prioritization of applications.
Many approaches are
evolving along different technologies for addressing these problems. We will,
in the next few years, have a mature technology in the Ultra Wide Band (UWB)
with EM waveforms of instantaneous fractional energy bandwidth using radiating
pulses that are very short in time and transmitted using an ‘impulse radio’.
In the context of a large social media, an efficient ‘Medium Access Control
(MAC)’ can be introduced to allow multiple users to share a common
resource. Another attractive technology is the optical wireless communication which
does not need spectrum allocation.
Fourth Generation Long Term Evolution
The 4G-LTE can
work on 1.2 Mhz to 20 Mhz as well as GSM frequencies with carrier
frequencies in the range 20-160 Mhz. It is based on Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplex (OFDM) modulation, which is highly resistant to multipath
interference. A new antenna technology called MiMo increases the
throughout several times. The 4G-LTE utilizes the allotted spectrum without waste.
4G-LTE enables the users
to take the centre stage by fulfilling most of their needs at low cost. Using
this, an adaptive, universally accessible, and easily configurable social media
network can be built which can cope with unprecedented complexities through
self-organized local controls. Though the network elements may vary
considerably in type and characteristics, we can host highly interdependent and
integrated applications. Despite the variety of network technologies and
services using them, seamless mobile communication can be made by the user, for
reaching personal services anywhere anytime over all access networks and
devices. The user can be guaranteed adequate security and privacy of
communication and transaction. With the availability of such facilities, the
user can build context and situation awareness, personalization and semantic services
into their applications along with a proactive service provisioning, which are
essential for a nationwide social media.
Impact of Nanotechnology
If nanotech
development accelerates at the current level, it will have substantial
impact on ICT, many of them conducive to the social media. Current capital investment
in nanotech is over $2 Billion, but R&D investment is ten times this. The
world wide nanotech product industry exceeds $ 30 billion. Indian nanotech export
is now about $ 100 million with over 50 companies actively involved in it.
Nanotech operates on the scale
of molecules and molecular clusters and so will reduce the size and power
consumption of ICT systems substantially. In ICT, its impact will be more on memory
and storage devices, displays, central processing unit parts and sensors.
Wireless devices and Wireless Communication systems are expected to experience
its profound impact by increasing the speed and memory several times and
decrease energy consumption. Both CMH and Wireless Systems will experience a
positive impact. Though toxicity concerns are there, solutions are in sight.
Web 3.0 and Beyond
Some of the major limbs
of Web 2.0 are: social book marking, social networking, content aggregation,
wikis, mashups and cloud computing.
Here, we had a new media
paradigm-Social Networking and a new technology paradigm- Microblogging.
Social networking is a social structure made of individual and/or
organizations, which are connected by one or more specific types of social
interdependencies such as friendship, membership, likes, dislikes, common
interests, beliefs, knowledge and the like. It increases the level of
interactions between like-oriented people. Micro blogging is a multimedia blogging
that enables one to send brief text updates or micro media and publish them
for viewing by anyone if public, or by a restricted group of one’s choice if
private.
In Web 3.0, the CMH, the email and the TV could all produce feedback
that can be conveniently incorporated on any blogging platform, thereby giving
a seamless integration that can give access to blogging for the masses in
the society as a necessity and not only as a hobby. Live blogging will
become common place and bring the world of conferences and gatherings wherever
you are and whenever it is convenient to you, with just a CMH in your hand.
This will make the conductors of such meetings & conferences to bend their
back to attract their virtual crowd.
Web 3.0 expands the web
2.0 features while it introduces new features like the semantic web in which
the meaning, i.e. semantics, of information and services on the web is defined,
making it possible for the web to understand and respond to the request of people
and automatic gadgets to use the web content. With semantic features of the
4G-LTE, the 4G & Web3.0 evolutions will take place synchronously.
With CMH becoming a
universal object of possession by everyone, carried with them at all times, several
new creative services will become possible. For example, the services of mobile
devices, Geographical Positioning System (GPS) and web-based data
can be combined in a convenient manner like the Location Based Services (LBS).
LBS can identify the location of a person or object like a friend, associate
or a nearest facility like ATM, including the ready display of a properly
oriented local map.
Access to real-time data
including real-time events of your interest happening will become prevalent on
Web 3.0, which can become a valuable asset in social networking. Real-time
search is also possible in which the data being searched is updated almost
instantly or very frequently, including soft search like opinions of a selected
group or popularity indexes apart from hard searches which are based on hard established
facts.
If more relevant
individual experiences are crucial in the social media, more personalized information
is called for, thereby impinging, sometimes, on the identity and privacy of
individuals, especially when such data can be linked and correlated through a Universal
Identity (UID) system like Aadhar. Web 3.0 has technological solutions to
obviate the need for ‘throwing the baby along with the bath water’. For
example, open ID is a Web 3.0 type concept similar to Aadhar which provides a single
digital identity for users that can be used all over the Web. Over
50,000 Web sites, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Face book permit users
to sign in using open ID. The present levels of security that apply to
online banking innovation including ‘Online Paperless Money Transfer’ is
getting incorporated into Web 3.0 to give the required secure, convenient,
seamless web experience.
Web 3.0 will move well beyond
simple keyword searches by increasingly making use
of semantic technologies to give a smarter search environment suiting the
volume and complexity of the social databases. The earlier success with Search
Monkey of Yahoo, Rich Snippets of Google, Bing Semantic Engine of Microsoft, among
others, have encouraged the evolution of more powerful search engines on Web
3.0.
The World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) pioneered the ‘Linked Data Project’ to link together Web-based
resources, that were not linked previously or were inaccessible as part of a Open
Data Movement, exemplified by Wikipedia. The potential importance of
this and similar projects to sociological analysis and research hardly needs emphasis.
This is one of the tools in the initial efforts linking several hundreds of
data sources on the social, economic and demographic descriptors of the cities,
towns and villages of India. This will assist researchers working on the creation
of social capital through policy frameworks and inclusive development initiatives.
The pioneering projects of W3C are supporting our efforts by shaping Web 3.0
with the objectives of : Web for everyone, Web content accessibility
as openly as possible, providing web security as much as an individual desires,
enabling a web on everything, providing an expanding coverage of mobility, providing
interactive expanding convergence on semantic paradigm over the web. This will metamorphose
websites into web services which is sine qua non of the feasibility of our
goal.
Web 3.0 is already there
but evolving the features outlined above among others and steadfastly galloping
towards 2020.
Mobile Intelligent Agents
The volume and complexity
of information content in society is staggering because we are dealing with
individuals and groups of individuals with enormous diversity with highly
time-dependent changes. To cope with this, web 3.0 provides what is
called ‘Intelligent Agents’, which are software programs that operate
unattended, usually on the internet. They are called ‘bots’ which make copious
use of artificial intelligence (AI) and mimic human behaviour, but with a speed
of several orders of magnitude higher. They can learn, make decisions and
interact with other intelligent agents autonomously. They can employ ‘data
mining’ techniques intelligently for searching and discovering basic facts
and relationships from a large mass of data.
MIA proffers a new
paradigm to internet itself. In general, MIA are programs that can migrate from
host to host in a network autonomously time-wise and location-wise. A mobile
code provides a single general framework in which distributed,
information-oriented applications can be implemented effectively and
conveniently affording the provider the flexibility to provide their users with
more useful applications and features. Availability of a mature, flexible and
useful enough MIA is slated only near about 2020.
Evolving Features of the Social Media
The social media
ecosystem comprises of interactions, activities, transactions, and behaviours among
a group of individuals with certain common identities and interests who can be
together called a ‘Community’. They share online opinions, information and knowledge
utilizing conversational media like brief texts, pictures and audio and video
clips. In as much as the social media and web 2.0 were closely related, though
not synonymous, Web 3.0 evolution described above already characterizes the
social media tools, services and applications that are evolving - with the
traditional categories of engagement : Communication, collaboration, Education
and Entertainment. The social media categories enabled by these categories of
engagement on Web 2.0 that we are already familiar with, viz., social
networking, Web publishing, microblogging, live casting, virtual reality constructs,
Mobility, Interpersonal Transaction, Sharing and Creation of Still Pictures
andAudio-Video Clips, Content Aggregation, Content Search, Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) of Content and Gaming, are not only made more versatile,
user friendly, ubiquitous and powerful for creative applications and services
in Web 3.0, more social media categories are getting added, each with their own
characteristics, strategies and tools.
Mobility combined with compute
power in the CMH is enabling all these categories in the social media ecosystem
to be accessed via the CMH, spawning more powerful and versatile tools than
Jott, SMS.ac, air-G, Brightkite, CallWave and the like which we presently use.
Not only the traditional
web publishing of texts like e-mail, web pages, blogs and wikis, but also
texts, audio and video in combination can be done using the CMH. There are apps
for professional editing and formatting in numerous fonts including
mathematical symbols. Several people in a community can collaboratively
publish a common theme to professional standards. For example, you can go
to the sophistication of collaboratively creating a documentary movie using
only the CMH and Web 3.0
Micro blogging, a cross
between blogging and text messaging, which expresses your thoughts short and purposeful,
is an economy of communication that Web 3.0 will continue to encourage but with
greater facility through semantic features and AI-supported ‘help’ to make it
short while being more purposeful. Reactions from a number of followers will be
reverse-tweeted automatically as gists again by AI & semantic supported tools
& can be automatically broadcast to all responders almost instantly
creating an environment for a sophisticated Delphi-type approach. This can
be a very effective decision-making tool to the limits of transparency.
With Web casting, which
broadcasts information online, you can create live content on CMH and distribute
or stream over internet or Broadband Community networks more dynamically on Web
3.0 than ever before, even in 3D or Virtual Reality form.
Syndication with a single
click can send your content to your followers soon after publication with
vastly superior media aggregators and social bookmarks supporting you. With semantic and AI-based search engines, we will have the
means to cope with the Information and knowledge explosion. It is with this
that the complexity and diversity of the society, so characteristic in our country,
can be addressed. The Web 3.0 based social Media is an appropriate and adequate
tool for the creation of social capital and hence social wealth through
development which respects inclusion, individual capability maximization, optimum
utilization of scare resources, appropriate and timely decision making and
bottom-up planning.
Instrument for the Creation of Social Capital
These social media
features can give new applications and instrumentalities which can create social
capital in a variety of ways. To understand this, we redefine social capital in
a delimited manner suiting the context of the social media.
The definition of social
capital in general can be nebulous. We can narrow the context to the optimum use
of the Web 3.0 based social media with an illustrative subset of applications :
inclusion, capability maximization and bottom-up planning in a socially
complex & diverse environment. In this context we can narrowly, but
with more clarity, define social capital as a function of Negentropy connoting
the magnitude of disorder to order transition with ‘order’ denoting sustainable
shared knowledge & norms of reciprocity, trust and positive values in a
network of relationships between individuals and/or communities which shape the
quality and quantity of interactions. Here, we consider social capital as a
function of only the human capital consisting, among others, of knowledge,
skills and attributes creating personal, social and economic wellbeing as well
as the Network capital qualifying interactions which increase community
wellbeing. From the development vantage, we consider the components as
communitarian, Institutional, Network and also Synergy integrating the previous
two. For our delimited applications we can consider social capital as bridging
the social and economic perspectives so as to give a better direction for
development.
The levels of social
capital that can be considered are: Individual Informal Social Groups, Formal organizations,
Communities and National.
Within the further
delimited context of social media, we use, people and content to find each other
through efficient searches afforded by Web 3.0 and make the best use of its
tools for the management of content.
Social media on Web 3.0
as an enabler of inclusive education and training for information, knowledge and
skill acquisition will also give a new meaning to e-learning and life-long
learning, the essential paradigms of the knowledge age. Semantic Web based
e-learning will drive distributed computing, collaborative intelligent
filtering and 3D (and 4D with time added) visualization and interaction based on
CMH amenable to multitouch screen technology. Self-organization and
personalization features will be emphasized. Mashup and cloud-computing
integrated into Web 3.0 will make e-learning more independent of centralized institutional
websites. This will make any-time any-place virtual class room and virtual
teacher based e-learning a reality with smart solutions to web surfing, content
management, and learning management. On top of all these the cost of education
and national human resource development will plummet down.
Combined with cloud
computing and Reusable component software technologies, the above Web 3.0 based
e-learning tools can also lead to the assessment of intrinsic capabilities of
all citizens, design a personalized capability enrichment programme and deliver
it on the CMH. In general this can be used for a widespread Human Resource Mobilization
scheme to empower all citizens inclusively.
Conclusion
In a country as diverse
and complex as India is, a properly restructured and prioritized social media
can act as a catalyst for the creation of the social capital in step with the
creation of the economic capital, synergetically reinforcing each other. While acknowledging
that the concept & definition of the social capital can be nebulous &
daunting a well delimited contextual definition is possible, as illustrated
here with reference to the social media. The by and large predictable developments
in ICT to the end of the decade are likely to transform the social media into a
social network capable of handling India’s diversity and complexity to the
extent we can intelligently mobilize it through technological innovation and
development which are germane to our social problems and applying these to
grass root necessities with proper a priori analysis of ground realities.
Social media can decrease
the social capital through entropic applications or can increase it through
negentropic applications. Controlling the media cannot give sustainable gains
in the long run. But, putting into the stream of social media far more
applications which increase the social capital than those that decrease it, however,
can.
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