our connected minds

my final project… April 17, 2007

Below is an excerpt from my COM 429 final project, presented earlier today in class. In searching for a research topic I knew that I wanted to further explore the concept of social capital. Specifically, I wanted to explore the different ways in which social capital is measured, accessed and reciprocated within online communities.

I decided to make the business networking site Linkedin the subject of my case study and the social capital theory of Nan Lin my primary tool of analysis, chipping away the hype surrounding Linkedin to reveal how this thriving online business community works, why it works, and for whom.

I encourage you to read the full text version of the paper, my research led me to some admittedly unexpected conclusions.

“…an effective and critical analysis of Linkedin’s functionality as a tool for business networking must begin with a definitional approach through the context of ‘community.’ Once a functional definition of community has been established and applied to Linkedin, we may then peal back the surface of the Linkedin community to reveal the theory of social and knowledge capital. Finally, the respective functions of both community and social capital (as well as the relationship between these two concepts) will be investigated and assessed through the lens of the leading business networking website, Linkedin.com. Along the way it will hopefully become clear to the reader how exactly the key concepts of trust, accountability, reciprocity, reputation and identity function and interact within the digital parameters of a virtual community such as Linkedin…”