Are we Bowling at all? An Analysis of Social Capital in Online Networks
Javier Sajuria*, Jennifer vanHeerde-Hudson*, David Hudson*, Niheer Dasandi* & Yannis Theocharis**
* University College London ** University of Mannheim
Overall Research Question
Is there evidence of social capital in online networks? In which way?
The problem
Putnam claims that ICTs are not able to create social capital for 4 reasons:
- Face-to-face interactions carry much more contextual information than technology-based interactions
- Online interactions foster "cyber-balkanisation"
- The presence of a digital divide
- The Internet is more about entertainment than communication
Observing Social Capital Online: Bridging and Bonding Social Capital
Neo-capitalist approaches understand social capital as the relative advantage of a member in a network.
They (Burt 2005) claim the distinction between brokerage and closure:
Brokerage: bridging over a structural hole in a network
Closure: the level of connectedness of a person in a group
Observing Social Capital Online: Bridging and Bonding Social Capital
Communitarian approaches are more concerned about the aggregate benefits of social capital.
They understand social capital as networks able to mobilise resources and information, based on norms of trust and reciprocity.
OBSERVING SOCIAL CAPITAL ONLINE: BRIDGING AND BONDING SOCIAL CAPITAL
Putnam argues that social capital can be separated between bridging and bonding.
Bridging: Inter-group ties
Bonding: Intra-group ties
However, he claims the difficulty of measuring them. In most cases, researchers rely on self-reported data.
Contributions of this paper
- Provide a measurement of the presence of social capital in online networks.
- Bring together no-capitalist and communitarian approaches by using brokerage and closure as indicators of bonding and bridging social capital
Theory
We test observed Twitter networks against network simulations using three widely used theoretical models:
- Erdos-Renyi (random graphs): Random networks according to given number of nodes and ties.
- Barabasi-Albert: incorporates the notion of preferential attachment (i.e. nodes are more likely to connect to heavily linked nodes)
- Watts-Strogatz: similar to BA, but incorporates topological features such as node neighbourhood and triadic closure.
hypotheses
- The levels of bridging and bonding social capital formed through online interactions are significantly different than random
- The networks formed through online interactions are, on average, less dense and weaker than the theoretical expectations.
- In online networks, bonding and bridging social capital operate in coordination, strengthening each other.
Data and Methods
Three "Twitter events":
-
Occupy Wall Street (4,352,071 tweets)
-
IF Campaign (101,842 tweets)
- Chilean Presidential Election (1,556,109 tweets)
Each dataset was cleaned leaving the sender, the message and all the recipients of the tweets. Then the networks were constructed using R (igraph)
data and methods
Two measures were used as metrics for brokerage and closure.
Brokerage -> Average Network Constraint Index
Constraint refers to the ability of a node of concentrating connections and being able to move information across the network
Closure -> Average Local Clustering Coefficient
This measure accounts for how close is a node's neighbourhood of becoming a clique.
summary of hypotheses and metrics
Results
Results
Results
- Almost all t-tests show a significant difference between the observed values and the models, supporting H1.
- Correlation coefficients between brokerage and closure are positive (or negative, given the way in which Constraint is measured). This supports H3.
Discussion
- The difference between the OWS and the other two cases in terms of brokerage brings an interesting question about the role of professional brokers
- The theoretical models we used are not able to account for the structural features of the online networks under study
- Online networks seem efficient to create bonding social capital, which in turn fosters trust and reciprocity
- Bridging social capital, on the other hand, does not seem to appear organically in online networks
- The interplay between bridging and bonding social capital goes in the right direction.
Are we Bowling at all? An Analysis of Social Capital in Online Networks
By Javier Sajuria
