The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

Our first dimension of social capital—bridging—assessed the extent to which participants were integrated into the MSU community, their willingness to support the community, and the extent to which these experiences broadened their social horizons or worldview. Our findings suggest that certain kinds of Facebook use (articulated by our Facebook intensity items) can help students accumulate and maintain bridging social capital. This form of social capital—which is closely linked to the notion of "weak ties"—seems well-suited to social software applications, as suggested by Donath and boyd (2004), because it enables users to maintain such ties cheaply and easily. Although more research is needed to understand the nature of this trend, we suspect that Facebook serves to lower the barriers to participation so that students who might otherwise shy away from initiating communication with or responding to others are encouraged to do so through Facebook's affordances.