First, I’d like to draw our attention to the adorable pre-Facebook networking site Netville:
‘‘Netville’’ residents with broadband Internet connections and access to a local online community discussion board were more likely to be involved with their neighbors than were their non-wired peers: They recognized three times as many and talked to twice as many.
Hampton & Wellman, 2003
In the beginning, Facebook, like Netville, had a “geographically-bound user base”—in 2006 when Ellison, Steinfeld and Lampe conducted the study that led to their paper The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites, you still had to register with a college email address, then you were “placed in a community” with your peers at said college, although you could still be Friends with people outside your college, for instance people from your high school, as the authors found was prevalent. The ability to maintain connections with close friends and acquaintances from your high school cheaply (that is, in terms of effort – commenting on a photo is cheaper than keeping up an email correspondence) helped college students feel connected.
Most notably the authors saw that a) most of the students surveyed had known their Facebook Friends offline first, and b) “intensive” use of Facebook increased rather than decreased their social capital. Prior to this paper, the popular wisdom on social networking sites seems to have been that there would be an online-to-offline direction – people would forge relationships online with strangers, and then meet them offline – and that overall, people would use SNS’s to the detriment of their feeling of connectedness and responsibility to their local (offline) communities.
This paper was interesting and I hope it did alter the way people thought about SNS’s; however, I have doubts that the authors’ sample was representative of MSU, let alone Facebook users (at that time, only college students) in general. They make a disclaimer about the ways in which their sample differed demographically from MSU at large (slightly more female, slightly more living off-campus, etc), but I’m thinking more about the students’ dispositions. Some of the respondents reported low self-esteem or low satisfaction with their lives at MSU, but you have to imagine that the really unhappy students would be less likely to respond to an invitation to take a survey about how many friends they have. Of course, I don’t know how they framed the study in their recruitment email, but it must have made mention of Facebook. Students who felt like they didn’t fit in, whether or not they used Facebook, would shy away from such a survey, I think, whereas students who were happily connected online and off would be more likely to take the survey. But that’s the way it is with surveys like this.
I also question the authors’ conclusion that students with low-satisfaction and low-self-esteem benefited from intensive use of Facebook (looking at Figs 4 and 5). Those students had more bridging social capital the more they used Facebook, yes, but could it not be that those students had low satisfaction and/or low self-esteem because of their intensive use of Facebook? That said, the authors clearly attained their goal: to show that offline social capital can be, and is often, built through online means.