Social capital is basically your social network and the benefits you gain by who you know. I think that writing could be a way to gain social capital, like using it to create reputation on social media. Writing could diminish social capital through stuff like having bad takes on social media perhaps. Well thats related to diminishing your own social capital. Creating a hit piece on someone could get rid of their social capital like those video essays on youtube calling out people for being bad. A recent example would be the survival minecraft server “SDMP” (Sleep Deprived Multiplayer) that one of its founders in a speech inside of the game said that there were no pedophiles on the server. This was in direct reference to the most popular minecraft youtuber, Dream, being recently revealed to have been doing bad stuff to children online and thus he wasn’t invited to the server despite having such a huge following. Writing could also build social capital by widening your social network if people enjoy your writing and choose to reach out to you. Like for example a highly cited research paper. Once you create that, now you have a valuable network of people who may ask you questions on the topics covered in your research paper. I think the thing that would make a society rich in social capital would be to have systems that incentivize having social capital, like nepotism and valuing specific people and their thoughts above other people. Hierarchy is an important element to create that value system with.
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