What People Make of Social Capital Online: Empirical Study on Capital Conversion via Networking Sites.

Social capital is considered an important aspect of social online networks. It is central to the idea of capital itself, that social capital can be converted into other forms of capital. However, the relevance of online social capital for finding a job or getting information faster than others has not been empirically researched, yet. This paper presents results from an online survey conducted on three large German social networking sites. Our findings suggest that different types of social capital (bridging, bonding social capital, obligations) are not equally convertible into economic, symbolic, and cultural capital. There are large interpersonal differences in social capital conversion effectiveness, that are best explained by the amount of available social capital and active investments into social capital – in other words – doing networking. Surprisingly, demographic attributes and structural variables, like network size, do only affect the amount of social capital, but not the effectiveness of its conversion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]