Impact Of Internet Use On Online Social Capital

Internet's influence on social capital has been widely discussed. However, previous studies have rarely touched upon how different ways of using the internet can affect the influence, and what different forms of social capital on the internet there are. This thesis introduces the concept of online social capital, chooses university students as the target subjects and explores the influence of different ways of using the internet on online bridging social capital.The thesis tries to analyze: (1)the relationship between internet users demographic variants, social and economic status index, personality and way of using the internet, and online social capital; (2)the influence of different ways of using the internet on online bridging social capital; (3)when the intervening variants, such as demographic variants are controlled, will the relationship between different ways of using the internet and online social capital change? The aim of this thesis is to combine the influence of the internet and the social capital of university students, and explore the gap in people's possession of social capital as a result of the difference in their using of the internet.The quantitative research method is adopted in the thesis, with 391 samples of university students via online and door-to-door survey. By factorial analysis, the 16 ways of using the internet are categorized in four types: information acquisition, online interaction, online recreation and e-business. The research shows the influence of different ways of using the internet on social capital: (1) using the internet for social interaction is conducive to the increase of online social capital, while using the internet for other purposes does little to help increase the online social capital.(2)personality is an important variant in affecting online social capital, as extroverted people are more likely to use the internet for online interaction and recreation.(3)people with poor education tend to use the internet for online recreation, while high-income people are more closely linked to online interaction.The main contribution of this thesis is to provide an empirical study of the influence of college students'use of the internet on their social capital; it explores the influence of different ways of using the internet on individuals, and the differences between online and offline social capital. Due to the limits of the research design, the results of the research cannot be applied widely enough, and it needs to be improved in later researches.