Social resources like trust and shared identity make it easier for people to work and play together. Such social resources are sometimes referred to as social capital. Thirty years ago, Americans built social capital as a side effect of participation in civic organizations and social activities, including bowling leagues. Today, they do so far less frequently (Putnam 2000). HCI researchers and practitioners need to find new ways for people to interact that will generate even more social capital than bowling together does. A new theoretical construct, SocioTechnical Capital, provides a framework for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations.

A computer network is a social network The network revolution We find community in networks, not groups. Although people often view the world in terms of groups (Freeman, 1992), they function in networks. In networked societies: boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive. The change from groups to networks can be seen at many levels. Trading and political blocs have lost their monolithic character in the world system. Organizations form complex networks of alliance and exchange rather than cartels, and workers report to multiple peers and superiors. Management by multiply-connected network is replacing management by hierarchal tree and management by two-dimensional matrix (Berkowitz, 1982; Wellman, 1988; Castells, 1996). Communities are far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit and fragmentary. Most people operate in multiple, thinly-connected, partial communities as they deal with networks of kin, neighbours, friends, workmates and organizational ties. Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them, each person has his/her own

We analyze collaborative play in an online video game, World of Warcraft, the most popular personal computer game in the United States, with significant markets in Asia and Europe. Based on an immersive ethnographic study, we describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players ’ enjoyment and learning of the game. We discovered that play is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations from brief informal encounters to highly organized play in structured groups. The variety of collaborations makes the game more fun and provides rich learning opportunities. We contrast these varied collaborations, including those with strangers, to the “gold standard ” of Gemeinschaft-like communities of close relations in tightknit groups. We suggest populations for whom similar games could be designed.

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This paper examines the location traces of 489 users of a location sharing social network for relationships between the users ’ mobility patterns and structural properties of their underlying social network. We introduce a novel set of locationbased features for analyzing the social context of a geographic region, including location entropy, which measures the diversity of unique visitors of a location. Using these features, we provide a model for predicting friendship between two users by analyzing their location trails. Our model achieves significant gains over simpler models based only on direct properties of the co-location histories, such as the number of co-locations. We also show a positive relationship between the entropy of the locations the user visits and the number of social ties that user has in the network. We discuss how the offline mobility of users can have implications for both researchers and designers of online social networks.

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As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. The Internet and the widespread diffusion of personal computing have the potential for unparalleled impact on the conduct of psychological research, changing the way psychologists collaborate, collect data, and disseminate their results. In this article, we focus on the way the Internet is changing the process of empirical research, identifying both opportunities and challenges. The Internet presents empirical researchers with tremendous opportunities. It lowers many of the costs of collecting data on human behavior, allowing researchers, for example, to run online experiments involving thousands of subjects with minimal intervention on the part of experimenters (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002b). Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards provide a rich sample of human behavior that can be mined for studies of communication (Galegher, Sproull, & Kiesler, 1998), prejudice (Glaser, Dixit, &

Blogs, regularly updated online journals, allow people to quickly and easily create and share online content. Most bloggers write about their everyday lives and generally have a small audience of regular readers. Readers interact with bloggers by contributing comments in response to specific blog posts. Moreover, readers of blogs are often bloggers themselves and acknowledge their favorite blogs by adding them to their blogrolls or linking to them in their posts. This paper presents a study of bloggers’ online and real life relationships in three blog communities: Kuwait Blogs, Dallas/Fort Worth Blogs, and United Arab Emirates Blogs. Through a comparative analysis of the social network structures created by blogrolls and blog comments, we find different characteristics for different kinds of links. Our online survey of the three communities reveals that few of the blogging interactions reflect close offline relationships, and moreover that many online relationships were formed through blogging. 1.

Though social network site use is often treated as a monolithic activity, in which all time is equally “social ” and its impact the same for all users, we examine how Facebook affects social capital depending upon: (1) types of site activities, contrasting one-on-one communication, broadcasts to wider audiences, and passive consumption of social news, and (2) individual differences among users, including social communication skill and self-esteem. Longitudinal surveys matched to server logs from 415 Facebook users reveal that receiving messages from friends is associated with increases in bridging social capital, but that other uses are not. However, using the site to passively consume news assists those with lower social fluency draw value from their connections. The results inform site designers seeking to increase social connectedness and the value of those connections. Author Keywords Social network sites, social capital, self-esteem, social skills,

Introduction A combination of Internet use and home computing have increasingly moved activities once almost exclusively ascribed to the public realm into the private home. It is increasingly possible to work, shop and participate in leisure activities all from within the refuge of the private residence. Computer-mediated communication allows for greater connectivity to resources and information, but simultaneously it may be disconnecting us from members of our social networks and reducing public participation. As globally connected as the Internet is the technology necessary for participation is inherently local, primarily available at work, school and increasing from home. Will the location of new information and communication technology in the home isolate us from our local surroundings? How will computer-mediated communication effect social relations at the local level? Netville The ideal setting to research the effects of home-centered communication and i