Social Capital as Currency: An Experiment
- 27 January, 2012 //
- Experience Design, Interaction Design //
- Tags : currency, experiment, money, social capital, thesis, thesis prep
- 1 Comment
“What is more important than money?” is the question I found myself asking. This came after having put a considerable effort into trying to fix what is currently broken with currency, only to accidentally reinvent it. To me, the problem with money came in trying to rework it in a system that was designed almost completely around it. In order to invent a truly new form of currency, it became imperative that one must rethink economic dynamics entirely, to the point of rethinking the need for the current form of economy. Friendship was the first word I wrote down, followed closely by love, trust, and respect. Social capital, as compared to economic capital, would dominate the rules of exchange and status.
I had the idea to split social capital into two different metrics: one that measured the breadth and one that measured the depth. This idea is generally supported by sociologists (see here), and their theory led to their respective names: Bridge and Bond.
The idea for my rethink of currency was simple. The world would be free of money, but people would still rely on each other for goods and services, and they would need a metric to evaluate the amount of trust and risk they would place by performing these acts for each other. Bridge would evaluate this breadth of the network, and is automatically assigned each time new people come into contact. Bond, however, is a limited resource that each person has to give. The amount of bond signifies many things in a relationship: 10,000 Bond could be love, 2,000 Bond could be friendship, and 5 Bond could be, “I appreciate the cat video you just uploaded to YouTube.” Bond could be positive or negative, and can be given and taken in any quantity at any point. Additionally, Bond would slowly return to the person who gave it over time, meaning that Bond would have to be maintained between persons. All of this information would be publicly viewable.
All implications aside, I was curious to see how, given Bond as a limited resource, people would react in this situation. I was slightly concerned about the societal implications, as it would require people to be completely forthcoming about their opinions of one another, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions before it happened.
And this came my experiment. With the exception of one person, who was asked to step outside, everyone in Thesis Prep was given a stack of eight “Bond” cards. They were given a brief about what Bond meant in this new culture, and were instructed to hand out as many cards as they wanted to whomever. It should be noted that each person had 8 cards, but there were 13 people participating.
The person who was outside was given the brief, and then asked to choose 3 with whom they would do a favor or collaborate.
The results of the experiment were mixed. Predictably, a large number of Bond cards went to the professors in attendance, and they were a scattering of cards amongst the students of varying levels. The person who was absent for the exchange chose people with lots of cards and with few cards, the idea being that the person with fewer cards lacked meaningful connections and would be easier to gain favor with, whereby the people with lots of cards had much more power and would better serve their own want to gain status.
What was more interesting were the reactions of those participating: Mark Bolas exclaimed it was “dirty money”—by creating a token to represent what in this case was assumed to be respect, it became tainted. There was much talk about the idea that our public opinions with others being something that is played down in modern society, and by bringing it to the forefront, I was exposing feelings with which people weren’t ready to deal. In essence, it seemed that dramatically shifting things like respect and trust, which are normally very personal ideas, into the public light made people extremely uncomfortable.
There are some things I would change if I were to run the experiment again. I’d have everyone do the experiment twice: the first where they had more Bond than people, the second where they were limited. I’d also run it where giving is far more anonymous, so I could compare and contrast the emotions with public and private giving. Lastly, I’d try to do a better job at separating the ideas of money and Bond.
I do think currency in this form is a viable notion, but it would require a dramatic rethink of how culture and society is structured, especially in the west.
[...] cross post from my personal blog [...]