Social capital and social media: The effects of Facebook use on social capital and perceived community involvement

The purpose of this paper is to look at the effect of social media use on social capital. This paper attempts to establish a dichotomy between `real' and `perceived' social capital and the effect of social media use on both. I use a survey instrument measuring both the social media use and `real' social capital of one group compared with the social media use and `perceived' social capital of the second group. I find that while social media use is related with survey respondents feeling more involved politically and in their community, there is no correlation between actual political/community involvement for other respondents.