Social Capital in Social Media Networks

Abstract

New social media such as Facebook and Google+ are web-based communication platforms that enable socially meaningful interactions between contacts in the virtual space (Ellison et al. 2014). Studies show that new social media are particularly conducive to social capital development, as they offer its users the possibility of creating heterogeneous, extremely large electronic social networks (Hampton et al. 2011). This article presents the results of a quantitative research study on the social capital and trust of the Lithuanian population in the electronic social networks. The study used an adapted D. Williams’ Internet Social Capital Scale (2006).