From Virtual Community To The Real Life: How The Star Stautus Influence People's Social Capital

Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the internet when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace。Here in China, with the increasing number of virtual communities, researchers gain in more interest to this phenomenon.This article provides an empircal study of virtual community. It shows a colligation of Communication Studies and Sociology Studies. The basis of this article is the former, which view internet as a new media, and the virtual community as a platform of interpersonal communication. Moreover, its key insights gained from the latter, which is viewing the interpersonal relationship in real life as a result of using virtual community.The research results confirmed hypothese: there are a group of people who could be called COMMUNICATION STAR on virtual community. Their usage helped them to become the STARs and BRIDGEs in real life's social network stucture, which mean a gain of personal social captial. Furthermore, two factors significantly affect people to become COMMUNICATION STAR on virtual community; the first is the sharing attitude of information via internet; the second is the trust of communication on internet. Social Network Analysis has been used in this article as a major method.Restrictions of this article include its insufficient theory and its questionair design. More efforts should be paid on construct a sustaining questinair, as well as the test of its reliability and validity.