Web2.0 Era Of Internet Usage Behavior And Examine The Relationship Between Users Of Social Capital,

Wilbur Schramm once observed on the close ties between communication and community: Communication is the tool that forms community; communities can not exist without communications and nor can the latter do without the former.Robert Putman noted that community is essential to people's social capital and that the most important way to increase social capital is to encourage communication and to create more space for communication. These shows the concepts of communication, community and social capital are closely interrelated: The three complement and contribute to each other.Researches indicate social capital is conducive to people's health, education, effective public governance, sustainable development, economic growth and human welfare at large. And given the close relations among communication, community and social capital as highlighted above, encouraging and enhancing human communication and creating more pubic communication spaces are the most practical and effective approaches to generate social capital and ultimately to better human life.Nowadays, human communication has been changed and enhanced by the fast-developing Internet beyond our imagination and the so-called Web2.0 has been a major driving force behind such changes. With their huge potential in increasing human communication and creating communities online, how will Web2.0 applications transform our social relations, change our social capital and push (or pull) the societal development? This is the questions that the current research tries to answer.Drawing on existent theories on social capital and human communication, the current research first comprehensively explores the mechanism, communication implications of and their contribution thereof to the accumulation of social capital of the users of three major Web2.0 applications: Weblog, folksonomy Websites and social networking Websites. Based on such explorations, the research comes up with its hypotheses, which are tested by analyzing data collected from both face-to-face and online surveys. The research finds thai: Weblog, folksonomy Website and social networking Website users have more social trust, wider and more diversified social network and are more inclined to say Internet use haven't decreased their offline social participation; that the time of such uses positively correlate to the users' social capital; that while the uses of the three applications contributing respectively to each of the three dimensions (social trust, social network and social participation) of social capital as defined in the present research, they all work on the social trust dimension to increase the users' social capital. The finding of the present research may imply that different Internet uses affect the users' social capital differently and that a "social capital gap" may exist between Web2.0 Internet users and other Internet users. These finding are useful for Internet communication and development policy making.The research is innovative in combining sociological and communicative theories for new media research and in using online survey for such purpose. It also reflects the researcher's forward-looking in his selection for his dissertation of such a topic on the latest development in information and communication technologies and their impact on human life.