Unfinished Work; seemingly related observations on human capital and social capital Social capital fundamentally has to do with relationships among people in some community. Social Capital is about the ability of members of a social network to work collectively to solve a problem. It begins in school. The book title "All you need to know you learned in kindergarten" is really a humorous observation about the important role that teaching practices and school routine play in the formation of social capital.
Membership in a social network occurs by learning the language and culture of the members and using that learning to engage in further social relationships. Much like the eco-challenge team adventure racing the most successful social network communities are those that have learned the importance of bolstering the social outcomes of their least advantaged members.
Social Capital is about placing bets or making investments that will lead to future cooperation. This is why education is so fundamentally important for the future of our societies. In America we owe much of our current success as a nation to the passions of Thomas Jefferson who was in his day the advocate of No Child Should be Left Behind.
Many studies including Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone show that there is a link or correlation between the increased time we spend watching TV and the decline of social capital. Both time and money are limited resources and we choose to budget the spending of our time and our money in ways that we think will most increase our household utility function. From the beginning of TV in the 50's the increased time spent watching TV had to come out of our time budget somewhere. It seems that TV time has comes out of time previously budgeted for participation in more social or educational learning activities. Activities like game play with neighborhood piers such as kick the can or important home learning activities like homework.
Dr Jeffrey Cole of UCLA began tracking time utilization in the 70's and always wished that he had the incite to start his surveys before the advent of TV. In that way he would have been much more able to track the charges in time allocation. When the Internet came along he got his chance and for three years has conducted a survey of Internet usage in America(pdf). What he is finding is that broad band changes everything. Today kids after school consume information as if it was snack food. New patterns of home Internet usage indicate that some are watching less TV and in its place spending time on line engaging in social and emersive literacy building activities like email, messaging and keeping up a personal web log publishing.
I'm stuck here and going to go read Seb's thesis (pdf)
3:47:43 PM 
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