Developing Socio-Technical Capital in a bilingual network

Matthew A. Chapman, ICS

Paul Resnick in his article, "Beyond Bowling Together" defines the term socio-technical capital to introduce a process for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations.  Here, the development of this capital in a bilingual, textual chat application is explored through the seven productive resources of its anatomy.  They include the establishment of a communication path, the sharing of knowledge, shared values, a sense of collective identity, obligations, roles and norms, and trust.

    The lack of a common language in bilingual networks creates a natural barrier to communication, and thus a barrier to establishing socio-technical capital.  In this Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experiment, a bilingual chat tool was rapidly constructed in order to breach the natural language barrier and qualitatively study the development of this capital in a bilingual network.   

    Qualitative study included lab experimentation, observations, and questionnaires in an information-gathering scenario.  Users were asked to play the role of either an adoption agent or a prospective client.  Agents where then asked to gather information on the client's place of residence.  The results of this ICT experiment are very encouraging.  Evaluation shows that the development of socio-technical capital was nearly identical in single-language and dual-language testing, where agents and clients did not share a common language.

    Although this application was rapidly developed and tested in very specific domain, this experiment illustrates that socio-technical capital can be developed across a natural language barrier with the integration of even a simple automated translation tool.