A community is a group of individuals, connected through some means, that share some commonality of interest, even if that only commonality is simply through membership in that group. We use our communities for a variety of reasons, one of these is to build social capital. This can be aligned similarly with Nan Lin’s definition of social capital, and categorized as self-interested individuals investing in social networking and other behaviors for a potential return.
This definition works better than others proposed in the past because it actually acknowledges that all beings are self-interested and that they are economic actors making rational decisions. The terminology of referring to humans as economic actors has its roots largely in the camp of Austrian economics and is best represented in the book, Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises.
3 responses so far ↓
bc // January 25, 2007 at 1:19 am
oh, i was with you up until “rational decisions.” so much of human behavior is anything but rational, in my experience, and in a social context, a socially networked context, it is my educated guess that the level of rationality is even lower.
we’ll discuss this. we will need to pin down what we (you and I) mean by “rational.”
ahunter3212 // January 25, 2007 at 12:26 pm
This is kind of what I mean by rational. Not necessarily logical, but definitely calculating and self-interested:
(1) characterizing behavior that purposefully chooses means to achieve ends
(2) characterizing preferences which are complete and transitive, and therefore can be represented by a utility function (e.g. Mas-Coleil).
bc // January 25, 2007 at 1:17 pm
then i am with you. i thought about this drifting off to sleep and came to a similar conclusion, of self-interest and, therefore, rational, but not necessarily (perhaps even not usually) logical. as you wrote, the rationale is self interest and not logicality.
i also thought that network theory explains how in the seeming chaos and illogicality of human behavior, when aggregated and directed, a rationality emerges. the NEXUS book has a wonderful example of combining millions of “accidents” to yield a pattern that mathematically resembles both the sea hake ecosystem and the map of the internet. surely such empirical similarity is rational, but not logical.
very useful follow-up. thank you.