The focus of this paper is on the relationship between Facebook and the formation & maintenance of social capital. The authors describe social capital as “the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’’: in short, a social repository of friends and acquaintances collected over time. Using measures of Facebook usage such as intensity, profile views, and new connections as well as measures of psychological wellbeing such as self-esteem , and satisfaction of life, and finally measures of social capital – bridging, bonding and maintaining social capital, the authors reached the following conclusions: Facebook has a strong association with the three types of social capital (building new connections, maintaining social capital, using it as a connection to an offline community), and it may provide benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem.
“the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’’
Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992)
Moving forward, it would be of interest as to where Facebook lies on the spectrum of usage in the same demographics of users. Facebook’s Instagram, as well as other social networking services such as LinkedIn and Snapchat, could easily form a different dynamic between users. As Facebook was found to be primarily used for maintaining social capital and networks, it may be of interest in how other services affect social capital. Moreover, threats to internal validity affecting self-esteem and satisfaction indexes were not thoroughly investigated. Another point of interest is thoughts versus behavior. The self-reported measures do not always align with user behavior, which could be of interest especially when studying user self-esteem and self-satisfaction. Another factor that is not discussed a lot is online harassment and trolling behavior, these factors could affect online social capital and interactions.
The study does a great job of understanding the effects of Facebook on social capital creation and maintenance. I believe that social networking behaviors have moved beyond several platforms competing for users to each platform targeting users for a specific use case. Social capital may be spread over multiple social networking services and this may be an important factor when studying user behaviors and their relation to social capital.