One of my favorite things about being in school is learning names for concepts that I am interested in but don’t fully grasp. “Social capital” is the most recent of such terms, with my foray into literature about social capital beginning over a week ago as I read for my HCDE 501 class (Theoretical Foundations of Human-Centered Design & Engineering). While class discussion was illuminating in its own right, it was the articles that were shared by my peers after class that truly piqued my interest. The most interesting of such articles was “Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?: Facebook Use and College Students’ Life Satisfaction, Trust and Participation,” which was written by Sebastian Valenzuela, Namsu Park and Kerk F. Kee and appeared in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 2009.

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