Internet expande las oportunidades de comunicación con millones de personas diferentes, proporcionando una fuente de relaciones puente muy importante. “the Internet provides expanded opportunities for communication and association with broad numbers of people. This is especially important for developing weak social ties, for which the Internet is a natural medium. As Collier (1998) explains, one of the simplest ways to promote social capital is to lower the cost of social interaction, and the Internet certainly achieves that. One leading sociologist has gone so far as to proclaim that the rise of the Internet has brought about a revolutionary growth of social capital”[1]. Internet es la fuente de acceso a una comunidad virtual de millones de personas. Es un espacio en el que individuos de diferentes lugares y culturas comparten información, opiniones e ideas. Y esta facilidad repercute en las posibilidades del desempeño social, económico, político y cultural.
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Recently, researchers have emphasized the importance of Internet-based linkages for the formation of weak ties, which serve as the foundation of bridging social capital. Because online relationships may be supported by technologies like distribution lists, photo directories, and search capabilities (Resnick, 2001), it is possible that new forms of social capital and relationship building will occur in online social network sites. Bridging social capital might be augmented by such sites, which support loose social ties, allowing users to create and maintain larger, diffuse networks of relationships from which they could potentially draw resources (Donath & boyd, 2004; Resnick, 2001; Wellman et al., 2001). Donath and boyd (2004) hypothesize that SNSs could greatly increase the weak ties one could form and maintain, because the technology is well-suited to maintaining such ties cheaply and easily.”
Esta cita pertenece a la pagina http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html , que plantea que la utilizacion de facebook amplia el capital social porque establece relaciones puente, que son debiles pero muy numerosas y de indoles varios.
Otras teorias, sin embargo, plantean que el uso de la computadora personal aminora el contacto y la comunicacion presencial. En este articulo ( http://html.rincondelvago.com/adiccion-a-internet.html ) se plantea que entre el 6% y el 9% de los usuarios son adictos a internet, y sufren de diversos problemas por no poder salir de enfrente de sus computadoras. La adiccion a internet es un problema tratado por psicoanalistas, ya que resuce el contacto fisico e induce a una depresion.
[1] Warschauer, M. (2003). Social Capital and access. Universal Access in the Information Society.
