Connecting Social Capital by Social Media

Abstract

Established sociological research on social networks and social capital has argued that large quantities of connections can represent access to resources. This claim has been challenged, due to the advent of social network sites. Researchers have little insights on how social actors use social network sites to organise particular web mediated social practices, besides for knowing they are employed for socialisation. There is also little research on how social actors use and connect to different social media applications and apply the resource embedded in them. This paper addresses that matter. It introduces a user perspective on how a group of social actors use a variety of social media application as resources, to carry out web mediated social practices. To empirically analyse this, the paper shows how a sample of Norwegian high school students use different types of social media applications for this purpose. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.