Social Network Analysis: Discussion

This project provides a snapshot of the way community organizations operate in Tahoe. In particular, it shows that, at least at the level of civic organizations, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of social capital around environmental issues in the broader Tahoe community. The organizations that dominate social networks on these issues—The Sierra Nevada Alliance, the League to Save Lake Tahoe, and Sierra Watch—have different interests and goals. Of these groups, only one (the League to Save Lake Tahoe) actively attempts to engage the public, and even then its effort seems less like a conversation between co-equal members of a community than a public education campaign.

The organizations that hold influence in Tahoe seem to fit perfectly with what Putnam (2001) says is a problem in the proliferation of advocacy organizations in the past few decades. He reports that in the period from 1968 to 1997, the number of such organizations in the U.S. grew by two-thirds. At the same time, membership in individual chapters of those organizations grew much slower. Consider the case of the American Association for Retired People (AARP):

[The AARP] grew from four hundred thousand members in 1960 to thirty-three million in the mid-1990s. But membership in good standing in the AARP requires only a few seconds annually—as long as it takes to sign a check. The AARP is politically significant, but it demands little of its members’ energies and contributes little to their social capital. Less than 10 percent of the AARP’s members belong to local chapters, and according to AARP staff, the organization’s grassroots were on life support even during the period of maximum membership growth. In many respects, such organizations have more in common with mail-order commercial organizations than with old-fashioned face-to-face associations. (p. 51)

The League to Save Lake Tahoe has a similar profile. Despite its high status in the Basin, it actually employs only five staff members. These staffers are environmentalists and advocates, not community organizations. Moreover, though it has something over 3,000 members, most are not very active and a majority live outside the basin. The League’s lack of ties to the community means that it has generated little social trust, and without trust there can be no social capital. As a result, the community’s ability to solve its problems is not enhanced. As UNR Political Science Professor Eric Herzik concludes, “It [the League’s profile at the lake] makes it hard for some groups to expand their organizational networks.”

This message is important for journalists at the lake to convey to the community. If a community lacks social capital, it is unable to respond imaginatively to the problems it faces. And if a community is under threat, then journalism is threatened too. This isn’t to say that more conventional uses of SNA are illegitimate. If a community truly is controlled by a relative handful of powerful individuals, then journalists ought to tell this story. Few communities however, are so dominated by a powerful few that other sources of civic capacity are also not apparent. Journalists have a responsibility to attend to these sources. As academics have learned over the past two decades, they can be powerful catalysts for civic change. By alerting their communities to this fact, and providing assessments of these resources, journalists help members of the community understand more about how and how well their community works.

Our orientation to journalism would have us go one step further. Though limitations of time and resources prevented us from doing so, we believe that journalists have a responsibility to help communities discover ways of acting on their new understanding. For example, now that we have conducted this study, we might present our findings to community groups and policymakers, work with others to create appropriate responses, and follow these responses through to their conclusions. In other words, a journalist’s responsibility does not end with publication. The point of our exercise is not to convey information, but to catalyze civic action. Again, if a community is not working well, journalism isn’t working well. Ultimately, we believe, with Dewey, that journalism’s purpose is to help communities solve public problems. If we confined ourselves to publishing our results, we would not be fulfilling the function of journalism as we understand it.

As we say, limitations of time and resources prevent us from taking this step. There are other ways in which, were we to follow up on this study, we might improve the project. Among them are the following:

• We might have collected background information on the organizations in our database prior to the interview process so that our questions might be better tailored.
• We might have surveyed rather than interviewed the organizations. Some academic literature suggests that surveys are more likely to generate a better, and more accurate response than interviews. For reasons of time, we elected to interview people. A future iteration of this project might elect to conduct surveys instead.
• Given the possibilities afforded by Web 2.0 technologies, we might have made the online version of our story more interactive. There are many ways this might have been done. For instance,
  • We might have created a program that allowed users to nominate other organizations for inclusion in our database;
  • We might have included a comment board that allowed the community to have a conversation around this topic;
  • We might have created a program that allowed users to play with social networks. For instance, they might have developed a game that allowed users to imagine new configurations of the network, and how those configurations might be realized.
  • Finally, we might have created a “small worlds” game that showed users how well individuals and groups are connected around the Lake (for an example of such a game, see http://smallworld.columbia.edu/)

In the end though, we consider this project a success. By using SNA to look at horizontal rather than hierarchical forms of civic power, we explained a bit about why Lake Tahoe is a dysfunctional community. Any community in which government agencies and advocacy groups dominate public space is likely to leave little room for other kinds of civic engagement. Our SNA demonstrates that this is the case at Tahoe.