Social Capital in Social Networking Sites

Hong Kong.
The next presenter at The Internet Turning 40 is Charles Steinfield, whose focus is on social capital in social networking sites. Social networking sites now rival search engines as the most visited sites on the Web; Facebook now has close to half a billion users. The key features of such sites are user-constructed public or semi-public profiles, a set of connections to other users on the system, and the ability to view and follow one's own connections as well as the connections of others.

Research into social networking has examined impression management and friendship performance, networks and network structure, bridging and online networks, privacy, and how users derive benefits from social networking. Such benefit can be framed especially as social capital: the accumulated resources derived from relationships among people in a specific social context of network.

Key questions here are whether social capital is an individual or collective phenomenon (of value - and able to be converted into economic capital - mainly to individuals, or of value mainly to the whole group or to society as such), and whether it is derived from a dense network of strong relationships or a loose network of weak ties. Some researchers have argued that the Net builds social capital by enhancing our connections to online and offline communities; some have suggested that it reduces social capital by substituting less valuable online interaction for more intensive face-to-face contacts - yet another view could be that online connections simply substitute for offline ones.

One theme here is identity and disclosure, and it is notable here that on the largest sites (like Facebook) users tend not to fake their identities; they reveal much about themselves and enable others to make sense of them, using profiles as important signals for how to place others, how to understand their interests, and how to contact them. Indeed, research shows that the more referential information about a person is available on their profile, the more connections in the network they appear to have.

Social capital can be bridging or bonding: social network sites help their users to form large heterogeneous networks of weak ties, linking to non-redundant information and bridging different groups of users (such bridging social capital also lowers the barriers to making connections); high users of Facebook may also have greater bonding social capital, but that relationship is less pronounced).

Connections between online and offline behaviour are complex, and cannot easily be split apart - maintaining existing relationships, initiating new connections, and seeking information are all common connection strategies, but it seems that users don't necessarily make new connections through sites like Facebook as much as maintain existing offline connections. The available technical affordances of the specific social networking site also make a difference, of course.

We still need better measures of social network site usage (especially also taking into account the context of use), though, as well as better measures of social capital; we also need to better understand the causal directions between use and social behaviour, look at a more diverse range of users (beyond college students), and understand broader patterns of migration between different social network sites and connection with other uses.

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