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Who wants to know?: question-asking and answering practices among facebook users

Published: 23 February 2013 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Research has identified a link between Facebook use and bridging social capital, which speaks to the informational resources provided by a diverse network of connections. In order to explicate the mechanism through which Facebook may help individuals mobilize these embedded informational and support resources, this study explores the role of bridging social capital, question type, and relational closeness on the perceived utility and satisfaction of information obtained through questions posed to one's network of Facebook Friends through the status update feature. Employing a mixed-method approach, we utilize survey data collected from a sample of non-academic university staff (N=666), as well as actual Facebook question examples and responses collected during a follow-up lab session from a subset of this sample (N=71). Results indicate that question-askers' bridging social capital positively predicts the utility of responses received on SNS, while useful responses are more likely to be received from weaker ties.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
      February 2013
      1594 pages
      ISBN:9781450313315
      DOI:10.1145/2441776
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 23 February 2013

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      Author Tags

      1. facebook
      2. information seeking
      3. q&a
      4. social capital
      5. social network sites
      6. social search

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      CSCW '13: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
      February 23 - 27, 2013
      Texas, San Antonio, USA

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      • (2021)The Strength of Weak Ties Revisited: Further Evidence of the Role of Strong Ties in the Provision of Online Social SupportSocial Media + Society10.1177/205630512110249587:2(205630512110249)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2021
      • (2021)Hello? Is There Anybody in There?Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34492095:CSCW1(1-21)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
      • (2020)L’interprétation symbolique des réseaux sociaux d’entreprise comme un frein à leur adoption au sein d’un groupe bancaire françaisSystèmes d'information & management10.3917/sim.194.0029Volume 24:4(29-56)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2020
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      • (2020)A Stochastic Framework for Social Media Adoption or Abandonment: Higher EducationAdvances in Computer, Communication and Computational Sciences10.1007/978-981-15-4409-5_26(287-299)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2020
      • (2020)Modeling the online health information seeking processJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2423071:2(196-207)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2020
      • (2019)Effects of Anonymity, Ephemerality, and System Routing on Cost in Social Question AskingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33611193:GROUP(1-21)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2019
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