The coronavirus has impacted all three components of Personal Capital, as described in my prior post. So, what is the effect? Has it settled on a new state of equilibrium? I don’t believe it has. Not yet. The aftershocks of working from home, students participating in classes from home, and the reliance on social media for social interactions continue to ripple through our daily lives. It is hard to break from its clasp, like trying to break an old habit. Since we cannot return to a time before social media, how will it meld into Social, Cultural, and Economic buckets over the long run?
At first glance, it may singularly affect Social Capital in providing person-to-person communication and entertainment. As a communication vehicle, it felt seductively safe and reduced the risks of exposing our and others’ emotional dimensions. It provided an isolating wall to hide behind and the opportunity to lob ‘snowballs’ of words you would never say if you sat face-to-face. It did little to promote empathy or advance our purpose to lead a joyous life. Building close relationships is a learned skill that needs to be exercised, just as exercise is required to keep our bodies healthy and strong. Emerging from these ‘lost years’, we need to nourish this atrophied skill that has diminished during the ‘lost’ years. We need to nourish the skill of initiating and developing in-person relationships. Jumping over the transom of isolation, like returning to the gym to work out, requires energy and determination to make that first trip. Instinctively we assume that social media is only in the Social Capital domain. In fact, it lies in all three.
A way to quantify human relationship capacity is to use Dunbar’s Number. In 1992, Professor Robin Dunbar (Oxford University) published the social brain hypothesis that links group size and brain size in primates. The cognitive capacity of the human brain correlates precisely with the size of the brain’s neocortex, which governs higher-order brain functions such as cognition, spatial reasoning, and language. He concluded that we have the capacity for 150 quality relationships and is wired into our ten million-year-evolutionary brains. The number will continue to change as human brains grow over the evolutionary horizon. Social media and artificial intelligence are mere pebbles to fuel change and make the brain more prominent over the next million years. Note change will follow the same time scale as the disappearance of molars, appendixes, and left atrial appendages, to name a few. Homo sapiens bodies will continue to evolve. Dunbar’s Number was and is considered in designing social media platforms, buildings, work groups, the size of military fighting units, and church congregations. This number represents quantity with quality. Quality therein is the soul of emotional closeness; hence, it does not include acquaintances. Family members, close friends or BFFs, and people we know bidirectionally well are examples of emotional intimacy.
The validity of Dunbar’s Number has been re-examined as social media has emerged. These studies confirmed that social media does not increase the brain’s governing cognitive capacity. But wait! It will. Check back in a million years!
Consider the most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter (on principle, I will not use its new name), Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Facebook primarily aids and promotes existing, real-world social circles. Traffic analysis revalidates Dunbar’s Number, even though you may have tagged several hundred ‘friends.’ Unfortunately, the barrage of suggested friends, ads, reels, and cartoons is just background noise and a distraction from getting to the friend posts. Reading these posts (screen time) without emotional content siphons the finite time we could spend nurturing our emotional relationships. It serves as a pseudo-blog platform for personal expression, entertainment, raising your hand to say, ‘I’m here; remember me’ or to reserve a hook for a future in-depth relationship. How many ‘friends’ in your account do you follow out of casual curiosity, never ‘like’ or comment?
Twitter doesn’t focus on relationships, but rather on the number of acquaintances and followers, and for some people, it becomes the definitive source of unqualified news and data. It doesn’t provide a structure to promote close emotional relationships. On the dark side, it is a fertile vehicle for spreading rumors, promoting conspiracy theories, and generally misbehaving with impunity. Sadly, it has migrated to become a political bully pulpit under Musk's ownership.
Instagram’s focus on video and image sharing provides a platform for creative and artistic expression but doesn’t generally contribute to building emotional relationships. The focus is on groups of common interest – both good and bad. It has become an excellent vehicle for pedophiles. Recently, Instagram recently (many say it is too late) put in a mode to safeguard to help parents manage their children's access.
TikTok is a platform focused on creative, engaging video content and not on social connections or communication. It has powerful editing tools to use posted videos to create new, altered videos and viral content. It is at the core of a technology dispute regarding company ownership between the United States and China as a national security risk. The United States has insisted that Chinese ownership be divested, or the platform will be banned.
Finally, Snapchat’s private messaging feature is focused on sharing short, temporary messages. It is generally used among close friends and augments emotional closeness in the absence of face-to-face interactions. Its immediacy becomes an ‘efficient’ tool for exchanging information. It helps cut down phone time. Nonetheless, it is not a substitute for touching, three-dimensional body language communication or building new emotional connections. It is the preferred platform for teenagers and the young.
So, let’s return to the original question: How does social media fit into Personal Capital?
First, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram, along with other tools such as FaceTime and Zoom-like applications, helped us smooth and navigate the rough waters created by the coronavirus by maintaining pre-existing relationships. Hence, they intuitively fall into the Social Capital bucket, even though they are not substitutes for in-person alliances like those provided by team sports or clubs. Qualification as a Social Capital asset requires interaction - posting and responding to postings. If we don’t, it is just a voyeur into how people you’ve tagged as friends are doing. It is just entertainment. Since most don’t offer an eraser to remove old posts, these posts float in the ether forever.
Second, Twitter falls into the Cultural Capital barrel. It is a vehicle for news, what’s happening, and following people of interest to you. You judge yourself and others on how many ‘followers’ you have – a scorecard on someone’s popularity. Think Taylor Swift and the Kardashians. Being one of 280 million Taylor Swift followers doesn’t promote personal relationships but is another unintended tool to promote tiers in our cultural caste system.
Third, the media platforms offer opportunities to create or enhance personal brands that can be monetized – the Influencer – in the Economic Capital realm. There are tiers of influencers: Mega have over 1 million followers, Macro have 100,000 to 1 million followers, and Micro have less than 100,000. How do they make money? Those with public notoriety, such as Cristiano Ronaldo (soccer player), Justin Bieber (entertainer), and Elon Musk (business executive), use the platform to promote their brand and receive compensation via endorsements, brand partnerships, advertisement, promotion, public appearances, etc. Macro and Micro-influencers generally focus on specific vertical markets – travel, beauty, fitness, and lifestyle. They target people with common interests. Social media is their economic engine to earn hundreds to thousands of dollars for endorsing a brand or providing advertising space.
The Venn diagram below suggests a way to parse social participants and place them into the Personal Capital model. The overlapping areas remind us that the boundaries are soft and deserve more detailed analysis to understand the blend.
In summary, today’s social media can be likened to the old Wild West—without laws or rules, no sheriff or mayor - a free-for-all. At its worst, it is the domain of bullies and gunslingers and their gang of supporters. Anyone can post anything they fancy without constraints or consequences. As a bullying platform, it has driven some participants towards self-harm. There is no mechanism to filter what is published. The FCC in the United States has rules to address false, misleading information that may result in public harm by radio, television, and news publications. Violations may result in liability lawsuits and loss of license to operate. There is no similar mechanism to guide and monitor social media. The overarching argument by media platforms to avoid this governmental oversight has been to commit to self-regulation. Very little evidence supports their commitment (Instagram being the recent exception). Acquiring wealth and power is the dominant driver, with little regard for the public good. So when will the good people of this town put guardrails in place? What is the tipping point of harm that will bring change? It will come, but I’m at a loss to see when. A few of the European governments are ahead of us in this regard. Perhaps these regulations will enter the United States via a backdoor. European regulations could bring law and order, which would benefit us indirectly. If we don’t want to surrender leadership, we must act. Why not fold social media into the FCC regulatory agency charter?
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