Social Capital and Power Relationships in Mobile Monday

Social capital and power relationships in Mobile Monday

Roger Gacula Pineda

“At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential antagonism, it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’—of a relationship that is the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation” (Foucault 1982:139).

Participatory culture is an emerging form of communal shareholding, which is associated with the peer-to-peer relational dynamic at work in distributed networks and giving rise to such processes as peer production, peer governance, and peer property modes. While the term participatory culture is more familiar amongst academics and specialists studying contemporary culture, issues touching the field has come into mass consciousness through the general media’s coverage of social media sites such as Facebook. The coverage underlines personal data security and privacy issues that have surfaced as an increasing number of people use social media, and find themselves in a space of possibilities for interactions, supported by technologies enabling instant global communication unheard of in previous times. For individuals congregating in the participative space of social media as an extension of their professional interests, the dynamic between their professional pursuits and the ideology dominant in the space present another dimension to contend with, namely, the dynamic between the cultural ethos of communal shareholding and the pursuit of social capital. In this essay, I use theories of participatory culture and a study of a professional community called Mobile Monday as basis for examining the dynamic. My analysis indicates that the joint pursuits of social capital and ideology of communal shareholding place individuals congregating in participative spaces on an agonistic course; awareness and understanding of this dynamic could help participants to plan for and mitigate inevitable conflicts arising in these spaces.

People who use participatory media are attracted by the sense of creative autonomy, low barrier to entry into the fields of production (Bourdieu 1993), distribution of cultural capital and of social capital. Some observers (see e.g., Bauwens 2005, Kluth 2006, Jenkins, et al 2006) characterize participatory media as phenomena that could have a democratizing effect potentially on the global level, in terms of self-expression, and sharing of knowledge, as well as an extension of the individual identity creation process. Participants who create weblogs, for instance, are generally motivated by self-expression. They join social networks to connect with friends and like-minded others. Thus, desires to belong to a community, to share knowledge, to pursue creative autonomy and the profits of self-realization are motivations fueling participants social actions. These desires and pursuits generally do not contradict with the ideology of communal shareholding. The pursuit of social capital, however, presents a power dynamic requiring further consideration.

Bourdieu defines social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—namely, to membership in a group—which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ’credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word" (1986). Bourdieu’s concept of social capital emphasizes conflicts and the power function—social relations that increase an agent’s ability to advance her/his interests. Social positions and the division of economic, cultural and social resources are legitimized by symbolic capital. Siisiäinen (2000) identifies social capital as a resource in the social struggles that are carried out in different social fields. The issue of trust could be dealt with as a part of the symbolic struggle, or absence of struggles in society. Trust as a potential component of symbolic capital could be exploited in the practice of symbolic power and symbolic exchange.

Social capital facilitates access to economic and cultural capital. Pursuit of capital places its pursuers into competition with each other. This competition in participative space might remain implicit until made explicit by participants themselves in a planned manner or through disagreements resulting from agonism. The latter applies to the case of Mobile Monday. Participants in this community are attracted by the low barriers to expression and engagement. They espouse the ideology of collective action supported by communal knowledge shareholding and thus share a common identity, yet disagreements amongst the group of international organizers responsible for coordinating the activities of the community created an atmosphere of distrust amongst them. One had to ask how an ideologically homogenized group could get in such a situation. The inflection point came when certain organizers began to convert their accumulated social capital to financial capital in a manner contradictory to the community’s ideals. Collectively, the organizers’ motivations for starting a Mobile Monday chapter thematically corresponds to the search for and sharing of knowledge about the mobile industry with others who share similar interests. Thus their motivations reflect ideologies of communal sharing, collective action and common interest. And although potential for personal financial gain is generally implicit in motivations for joining professional communities such as Mobile Monday, organizers emphasize accumulation of knowledge, personal contacts and social capital as benefits they have gained through the community. Employing social capital in the pursuit of financial capital, in principle, does not directly contradict the community’s communal shareholding ideology. Some organizers has made trade-in-kind deals supporting individual projects without causing antagonism. As the perceived value of the Mobile Monday trademark increased in the eyes of the general audience of the mobile industry, the perceived value of social capital gained through the community also increased. And when a subgroup of organizers began using these assets to support for-profit business activities directly competing with similar not-for-profit activities collectively run by the community, the stage was set for a struggle to control intellectual property rights to the trademark and the flow of knowledge within the community.

The disagreements regarding control of the trademark paralyzed the clique of international organizers, consequently affecting