social literacy?
Oh, the sadness of disorganized bookshelves and the irrepresible urge to box untidy-looking books and put them in the attic! After yesterday's post, I realized that nobody-but-nobody should be talking about social capital without a nice dollop of Pierre Bourdieu for good measure.
But I can't find my _Language and Symbolic Power_ to save my life. Ugh. I must have ferreted it away... so I'll have to work from memory. But back to Putnam first.* He traces the first use of the phrase "social capital" to a man from, where else, good old West Virginia. This guy, L.J. Hanifan (state supervisor of rural schools at the time--1916) argued that connections and cooperationbetween neighbors might improve inividual students' chances at succeeding in school. Apparently, then, a whole slew of other scholars, in fields such as economics and sociology, took up the term independently at different parts of the 19th Century (Putnam 19).
What strikes me, here, when I consider social capital within the context network literacy, is that I have the inclination to somehow attribute network literacy to the explicit understanding and use of social capital. That is, much in the same way Bourdieu's work meant to uncover the unspoken structures in culture that dictated who has power and how that power is enacted, I'm driven to think about network literacy as being directly related to--or the result of--similar understanding about social capital, for instance: who *has* social capital, how it works, how it might be cultivated and maintained.
An easy example of the overt understanding of social capital might be the ways in which bloggers learn quickly that in order to get readers, a blogger must first be a reader and responder himself, making connections outward by leaving comments and trackbacks to other bloggers.
The problem with looking at network literacy simply as a function of one's ability to gauge and create social capital is that it reduces network literacy to what Selber (and Banks) would call "functional literacy." In other words, saying network literacy is simply social literacy via internet and software connections ignores those meta-moves that users make, doesn't allow for users to subvert conventions of social literacy, to make changes to the conventions, or to understand (and manipulate) the ways in which their actions shape and inform the network itself (these latter understandings might be filed under Selber's "critical literacy").
On the other hand, to understand and use essentially unacknowledged-yet-firmly-entrenched conventions indicates that a meta-understanding...
But not always, especially if we look at network operations in terms of symbolic power, in that understanding and using conventions doesn't always involve the ability to "buck the groove" as it were.
*sigh* I think this constitutes a paragraph. I have to go make pie.
*should have put this in the last post
Putnam, Robert D. _Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community._ New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.