The accumulation of social capital

Future Foundation’s Richard Nicholls: Happiness will be defined as social engagement, skill accumulation, professionalising one’s approach to one’s own needs, taking the steps most likely to lead to a healthier, wealthier life. At least, it will be on Facebook…

All consumer-citizens carry a vision of their better selves: how we like to be seen and appreciated by others. Increasingly, we parade our skills, our accomplishments and our experiences rather than merely our material possessions.

The trend thus massively influences the services we crave and the communications language which will work best with us in the marketplaces we visit.

The essence of our trend is as follows:

• That as we grow wealthier and better educated so we like to put our 21st century sophistications on display

• That boasting about our possessions or even casually but pointedly mentioning them in conversational tangents is not the psychological itch it once was

• That we, in our millions, want to achieve savoir-faire and savoir-vivre and thus endow our lives with quality experiences we can share with others and that we abhor the boring, the obvious, the ersatz

Of course, there will always be those people who find fun in vrooming out of their driveway every morning so that the neighbours look at their BMW again. Or those want to explain the ingredients of the Gevrey Chambertin they have just poured for you into Arthur Price goblets at suburban dinner parties. Or those who insist on telling you how much the D&G suit or Patek Philippe watch actually cost them.

And there will be brands which will continue to make a good living out of the proposition: Buy me and social status + approval will be yours. (Oh and you will avoid making gaffes in front of your friends too!).

But things are generally different now.

Fewer consumers these days feel a need to paste labels over their personal, their provincial insecurities and millions do not seem so pressured to prove, via the ostentation of objects, that they have mounted the social gradient to join the middle class. And, yes, there are brands – Tiffany, De Beers, Dior, Tag Heuer, Hermes, Gucci – which directly address the super-rich but are not so exclusive in their commercial propaganda that they signal to the only moderately well-off that they are, qua symbols of success and good taste, not for the likes of them. Few brands can depend for sustained sales on the super-rich alone. Exclusivity is so much more open-minded these days.

Moreover, in an age when 70% of British people regularly tell nVision that they are concerned about what they can personally do to help the environment and a similar proportion are personally concerned about the effects of climate change, it just does not seem cool to talk about how deep one’s footprint digs or how much frivolous fun one guzzles. And the very idea that someone would boast about how much his air ticket or her holiday cost now seems more than a little preposterous.

Mastery of life is today’s conventional aspiration.

A potent symbol of the appetite for self-actualisation, Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, has been running since 1998. For middle-class Britain, book clubs are the new Bridge. For every age segment over 24, reading is a more popular pastime than visiting pubs or doing sports. (Source : National Statistics 2010). Lorraine Pascale and Raymond Blanc produce improve-your-cooking books which are bestsellers alongside the most successful crime or romantic fiction. Television schedules fill with mid-evening programmes that tell us how to dress elegantly and look younger / more attractive to others; to realise the value of heirlooms and attic-junk alike; to make lemon sponges with pro-am skill; to colour-theme the flowers in our hanging-basket; to understand astrophysics to the point where participation in a pub discussion thereupon could be possible. Doubtless later-night schedules will also show you how to draw amusement from advanced Japanese rope bondage techniques.

This is an age in which it becomes seriously unimpressive not to be able to show some accomplishment or some private knowledge-accumulation. Britain is one glorified pub quiz in which nobody should be coming last.

Social Capital and the Digital Revolution

And the trend has, of course, been powered forward by the Digital Revolution. The Richard & Judy Book Club, for instance, communicates via Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as well as its retail partner WH Smith. The once simple business of reading has long since become a social, a shared endeavour. Who will want to say out loud that they have never heard of Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell? Alternatively, how many love to post their opinions about the latest books and films they have seen. By 2011, there are around 800 reviews of the film Avatar posted on amazon.co.uk and over 500 reviews of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. The invitations to some form of engagement with cultural activity are now so numerous and so casually available that it almost seems impolite not to participate.

The Digital Revolution brings a lot of sharing and competing and thus, as it were, joint-venture social capital accumulation.

By 2015, 70% of people in the UK (and virtually all under-24s) will be active social networkers. The opportunity to broadcast our career successes, show the breadth of our personal connections and enumerate all our hobbies and interests thus becomes infinite. Around 30% of Brits confirm that, in their view, the number of good friends in their possession has actually increased since they joined a social network. (Source: nVision Reseach 2010)

And, of course, online gaming has, as it has developed, weaved itself into the daily fabric of social networking as titles like Playfire and Raptr show. Around 60% of under-24s go online gaming at least once a week with those in the 25-39 age segment not too far behind. Some 20% of all Brits play online games either once or several times a day. This should no longer be seen as a solitary, sad, displacement activity. For many, it is a platform to show their determination, their tactical skills, the rapidity of their responses – a whole inventory of achievements that can be made known to family, friends (old and new) and even potential employers.

Finally, we have to mention the modern phenomenon of collectivist market activity. Online buying groups (Groupon, Keynoir…) do offer the prospect of finding great bargains but can also be in themselves a kind of game in which the savvy shopper outwits the original pricing strategy of the brand-owner (often by waiting to pounce when prices significantly drop). According to nVision, over 40% of those in the highest socio-economic segment now say (2010) that they are interested in joining an online buying group in search of lower prices (and this figure is higher than that of other segments). There just seems to be no social juice left, as is suggested above, in paying full retail price – and millions want to share the news of their victories in this very field.

Statisticians and policymakers alike are increasingly interested in testing just how contented the British actually are. In public surveys (viz, those run by National Statistics) there is specific questioning about whether the things we all do make life seem worthwhile or not. In a sense, this is an attempt to measure just how much social and cultural capital is actually being accumulated. One has to expect that in the future this debate will grow ever more prescriptive.

In other words, the feeling will spread that there are things we should all be doing to live the good life. It is unlikely this will involve not participating in a sport or failing to volunteer for local community projects. Happiness will be defined as social engagement, skill accumulation, professionalising one’s approach to one’s own needs, taking the steps most likely to lead to a healthier, wealthier life. This makes this trend a hard-running dynamo of change in the way we see ourselves and in what is expected of us all.

For more, contact Richard Nicholls at the Future Foundation on 020 3008 6103/ richardn@futurefoundation.net.