[2] Jenny Preece suggested to evaluate communities according to physical features: size, location and the boundaries that confined them.
Rheingold defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace".
[10][page needed] Simply put, social capital is “the ability of people to work together for some common purpose” (Rosenfeld, 1997).
Second, any attempt to measure the properties of inherently ambiguous concepts such as "community", "network" and "organization" is correspondingly problematic.
Knack and Keefer (1997) used indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Survey for a sample of 29 market economies.
They combine several related items into an index of "social capability", and show that this can explain significant amounts of variation in national economic growth rates.
[18][page needed] Business 'cluster' is “used to represent concentrations of firms that are able to produce synergy because of their geographic proximity and interdependence” (Rosenfeld, 1997).
[19] Steinfield, C. et al. (2010) found, that “the amount of perceived social capital significantly predicted market exposure” of company performance in a knowledge-intensive business cluster.
[20] The rate of networking (defined as various forms of strategic alliances and joint ventures) generally reflects the levels of social capital and trust that exists (Rosenfeld, 1997).
[10][page needed] There is some evidence suggesting that social relationships play an important role in the survival of small businesses (Granovetter, 1984), yet the relative contribution of other factors, such as managerial skills and environmental context are unknown.
These forms of social capital are found to contribute to student learning outcomes in East Asian countries such as Singapore, Korea, and Hong Kong.
According to Katz, Rice, Aspden (2001) “Internet has unique, even transformational qualities as a communication channel, including relative anonymity and the ability to easily link with others who have similar interests, values, and beliefs”.
[22] Internet, and computer-mediated communication supports and accelerates ways how people operate at the centers of partial, personal communities, and switching rapidly and frequently between different groups (Wellman, 1996).
According to Gilleard, C. et al. (2007), “ownership and use of domestic information and communication technology reduces the sense of attachment to the local neighborhood among individuals 50 and older in England.” But they continue that “domestic information and communication technology may be more liberating of neighborhood boundedness than destructive of social capital.”[26] Anonymity is often mentioned in popular media as a possible cause for negative effects.
But according to Bargh and McKenna (2004), anonymity also associated with positive effects: “research has found that the relative anonymity aspect encourages self-expression, and the relative absence of physical and nonverbal interaction cues (e.g., attractiveness) facilitates the formation of relationships on other, deeper bases such as shared values and beliefs.”[24] Pigg and Crank (2004) suggest how Internet can facilitate interaction within members of community.
[30][31] Galston (1999) suggested an approach to analyze virtual communities based on entry and exist costs: “when barriers to leaving old groups and joining new ones are relatively low, exit will tend to be the preferred option; as these costs rise, the exercise of voice becomes more likely.”[25] He suggested, that “exit [from community] will be the predominant response to dissatisfaction”.
Also, “virtual communities do not promote the development of voice; because they emphasize personal choice, they do not acknowledge the need for authority”, and do not foster mutual obligation.
For example, Bargh and McKenna (2004) wrote that “Internet, mainly through e-mail, has facilitated communication and thus close ties between family and friends, especially those too far away to visit in person on a regular basis”.
“When Internet-formed relationships get close enough (i.e., when sufficient trust has been established), people tend to bring them into their “real world”—that is, the traditional face-to-face and telephone interaction sphere” (Bargh, McKenna, 2004.
[32] Cummings, Lee and Kraut (2006) found that students who move off to college “communicating with these friends prevents the relationships from declining as swiftly as they otherwise would.
[37] And yet, personal and often sensitive information is freely and publicly provided.” Therefore, users potentially expose themselves to physical and cyber risks.
For example, Pigg & Crank (2004) suggest that studies of relationship between online networks and social capital is still too much in their infancy to reach any useful conclusions.
The Net is particularly suited to the development of multiple weak ties (Castells, 1999), thus expanding sociability beyond the socially defined boundaries of self-recognition.
[35] Internet supports weak ties between individuals, which can the foundation for bridging social capital (Ellison, Steinfieldm, Lampe, 2007).