Abstract
In 2016, a young Italian shepherd by the name of Gian Daniele Calbini published a homemade video depicting one of his animals chewing a gum (at least he looked like he chewed a gum). The video was watched by millions on Facebook. Calbini received awards and air-time on mainstream television. The argument forwarded in Massimo Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu’s book Digital Capital: A Bourdieusian Perspective on the Digital Divide (henceforth DC) is that the young shepherd had relied on his digital capital to create for himself an upward trajectory in the social hierarchy. The video had brought him both fame and fortune. For Ragnedda and Ruiu, digital capital constitutes capital in its own right and is key to accumulating social, economic and cultural resources in our digital world.
It is this compelling argument that is developed throughout DC. The short book, covering some 80 pages and an appendix, is a development of the authors’ previous efforts (Ragnedda, 2018; Ragnedda et al., 2019) to establish that digital capital is a specific form of capital – one that can be accumulated and converted into other capitals – which leads to outcomes that increase agents’ life-chances. This capital, the authors contend, is special because it constitutes a bridge between online and offline worlds. Only those with enough digital capital can properly reap the benefits of their ‘offline capitals’ (p. 37) in the digital realm. Conversely, agents with high volumes of ‘offline capital’ such as economic, cultural and social capitals are more likely to possess high amounts of digital capital.
The argument is fleshed out in three chapters. The first is dedicated to explaining why digital capital is capital in its own right and why we need it in our theoretical toolkit. It situates the argument primarily in relation to Bourdieu’s forms of capital (see e.g. Bourdieu, 1986) and previous research on the digital divide. The second chapter presents a way to operationalize and measure digital capital. Digital capital comprises ‘internalized’ competencies in relation to ‘external’ digital technologies. Accordingly, digital capital = (digital media literacy) (access to digital technology). Over 20 variables are then used to capture both access to digital technology and the skills required to make productive use of these technologies. Chapter 3 presents the implications for policy and decision-makers. The concept digital capital is used to arguably provide new ways to identify and combat digital and social inequalities.
DC is an accessible and compelling read and should be of interest to anyone concerned with contemporary social and digital inequality. Having said this, a number of questions arise from reading the book.
First, I am struck by how little the reader gets to learn about digital capital in relation to the fields in which it is supposed to function socially as capital. The book, while pledging allegiance to Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, engages only with a delimited part of the wider theory – the forms of capital. The accompanying concepts of field and habitus are mentioned only in passing. This raises the question which fields are actually discussed when digital capital is presented as a new form of capital. Is it equally valued everywhere? Is it the same everywhere? And can it really, as the authors suggest, be replicated across socio-cultural contexts?
With regard to the notion of social fields, the authors argue that digital capital is ‘the dominant form of capital in the digital field’ (p. 56). This field is, however, not explicated and I cannot help but wonder what it really is. I doubt it could be considered a social field in Bourdieu’s sense, which would mean it would be autonomous from other fields, have its own logic of practice, investments and stakes. Rather, it seems as if the authors use the ‘digital field’ as synonymous to ‘the online world’ or ‘the internet’? If this is true, wouldn’t the ‘digital field’ be nothing more than the (digital) realm wherein a plethora of social fields are enacted (cf. Selwyn, 2004)?
Second, digital capital is presented as a ‘bridge capital’ (p. 9) between online and the offline realms. Digital capital cannot, the authors contend, ‘be reduced to a mere component of the cultural capital because it concerns a specialized (digital) expertise that not necessarily requires high levels of offline cultural resources’ (p. 24). Thus, Bourdieu’s forms of capital are considered ‘offline capitals’ – disentangled from the online realm (the digital field?). In order for ‘offline capital’ such as cultural capital to pay off and increase life-chances in contemporary media-saturated societies, one would need digital capital. I wonder how fruitful such a conceptual separation of the online and the offline is. Isn’t a main argument today that the online and the offline have merged in the era of ‘deep mediatization’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2018)? Doesn’t treating social, cultural and economic capitals as ‘offline capitals’ come with a blindness to the digitized society that the authors set out to scrutinize? A key point for Bourdieu was that the ‘contents’ of the various forms of capital – particularly cultural capital – change with time (cf. Lizardo and Skiles, 2015). It would, accordingly, make perfect sense to treat digital skills or media literacy as forms of embodied cultural capital in today’s digitized societies, and communication infrastructures and access to digital media as objectified cultural capital or perhaps economic capital (see Neveu, 2018, for an in-depth discussion on the invention of new capitals). If we view, as many do, the division between online and offline as somewhat arbitrary and detached from the character of contemporary life-worlds, and if we follow Bourdieu in approaching cultural capital in an open-ended and empirical way, it may be difficult to stand by the argument that digital capital is capital in its own right.
My third point regards the operationalization of digital capital. A key point in empirical Bourdieusian sociology is the separation between the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ realms. The former deals with the objective properties of a field – the distribution of forms of capital. These include salaries, assets, occupations, number of books at home, educational merits, field-specific capitals and so on – ‘objective’ resources that can be possessed. The subjective realm includes practices, skills, attitudes and opinions that function as position-takings between groups in society endowed with different volumes and forms of capital (see Rosenlund, 2015, for an elaborate discussion). Bourdieu (1984) understood ‘subjective’ orientations – practice in the broad sense – as the result of the interplay between field, capital and habitus, not as capital in and by themselves (p. 101). Digital capital thus finds itself somewhere between these realms – it is at the same time practice (e.g. certain skills and attitudes) and ownership of goods (smart phones, laptops etc.). This is perhaps not a problem per se (indeed Bourdieu, 1986, cultural capital includes embodied, objectified and institutionalized states) although it implies that the constituents of this capital will vary greatly over space and, in particular, time. The bigger problem is that the authors rely on self-reports when measuring digital skills (e.g. statements like ‘I am confident in browsing, searching and filtering data’, p. 44). This raises the question concerning the validity of the operationalization. Researchers using this approach must be aware of the risk that the proposed measurement may capture digital confidence rather than skills, and that such confidence may vary with contexts (fields), resources (capital) and embodied social histories (habitus).
Back to Gian the Italian shepherd. Was his viral success on social media the fruits of his digital capital? Or was his success a case in point regarding the changing character of cultural capital in our digitized world? In which field did he reap the benefits, and where did he remain unacknowledged and underprivileged?
DC will likely provoke parts of the Bourdieusian orthodoxy, which would be likely to argue for going back to ‘the basics’ of Bourdieusian sociology. It is equally clear, however, that DC is a thought-provoking book that will inspire both empirical research on the contemporary digital divide, and discussions on social and digital inequality not least because of its practical applicability and ambitions to take Bourdieu into the digital realm.