The opportunity to connect with a broad audience with minimal cost has a sizable return on investment for individuals with a large network of weak ties.  Those who utilize social networking sites do so for many different reasons. For some, social capital comes in the form of validation. These individuals get their benefit by the number of comments and likes on their content. For others, their social capital may be the opportunity to ask questions and receive almost immediate responses from a diverse group of people within their online network. Weak ties within one’s network can be utilized to provide an individual with more varied information. As Vitak and Eliison state, people may even prefer asking questions via status update over using a search engine as it provides an additional opportunity to interact with the responses to their query (2012).

 There may be additional benefits to those who have difficulty socializing in person. As Ellison, Lampe, Steinfield and Vitak found in their study With a Little Help From My Friend,” those lower in self-esteem reported greater benefit in terms of bridging social capital from their Facebook use than those with higher self-esteem.”(2011). Several reasons for this are explored from better control over self-presentation to lack of non-verbal cues found in traditional in-person interaction (Burke, Kraut, Marlow, 2011). Additionally, there was evidence that online interaction produced some side effects that were surprising to me. In particular the evidence from Hampton, Sessions and Her (2009) as presented in Social Capital on Facebook: Differentiating Uses and Users that there may be less racial and political prejudice in those that post and share regularly online (2012). I don’t think this is saying that the internet is curing social awkwardness or prejudice, but it is opening up opportunities for people to communicate in new ways and removing barriers to what were once taboo topics.

As for myself, as a result of “context collapse”, I do censor myself a great deal on Facebook in particular. Now that it seems everyone is on it, I’m not as willing to share information or opinions through that medium as I once was in the .edu era. Only the most sanitized of content seems to be appropriate to share to everyone. Yes, Facebook has given me the option to sort people into sub-groups to give me better control over who I share with, but honestly, I’m far too lazy to utilize that feature. It would take forever to sort my “friends” into sub-categories and it is simply too much work for the pay off.  As Ellison and Vitak cite from Hogan (2010), “when disclosures cannot be selectively distributed to different audiences, users may choose to self-censor posts so that only the most banal content is shared with their network” (2012). I imagine that a lot of people, aside from the 10% of super users, are self-censoring the same way I do. So despite the usefulness of my large network of weak ties, I’m under utilizing them as a result of context collapse.