An Analysis of the Socio-Technical Gap in Social Networking Sites

This chapter views social networking sites as supporting social capital and the advantages which derive from it, namely emotional support, information exchange, and a capacity for concerted action. Social capital is subdivided in three types: relational, cognitive, and structural. The authors derive a number of social needs from these types of social capital and discuss how the social networking sites considered in this study support or fail to support these needs with technical features. The contributions of this chapter include the dimensionalisation of the socio-technical gap in social networking systems and a discussion of elements that reside in the gap. It is hardly possible to overrate the value... of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with the modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar... Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress. —John Stuart Mill (1848)