100 Who Are Our Friends?
instrumental exchanges). To this typology, Ellison et al. (2007) added maintained
capital, or ties maintained by social media across life transitions (e.g., continued
contact with high school friends while at college). Ellison et al. (2007) found
Facebook use was positively associated with all three forms of social capital, with
a particularly robust association with bridging capital. In a follow- up to this early
study, Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2011) differentiated between the total of
number of friends on Facebook and “actual” friends (i.e., those with whom the user
believes they hold a bona fide friendship as traditionally construed). The number
of “actual” friends positively predicted bridging and bonding capital, yet total num-
ber of friends did not; behaviors designed to seek social information about friends
also positively predicted social capital. Thus, Ellison et al. (2011) concluded social
media like Facebook may function as a “social lubricant” that facilitates weak tie
formation and support exchange (p. 15).
Self- disclosure represents one strategy for gaining social support from a social
media friendship network (Manago, Taylor, & Greenfield, 2012), yet context col-
lapse may mitigate against willingness to engage in disclosure (Vitak et al., 2012).
Those with greater size and diversity in their social media network therefore use
more privacy controls to segment their disclosures, and use of such features makes
people more aware of their disclosures without decreasing disclosure frequency;
despite this, network size and diversity appears to promote rather than inhibit the
formation of bridging capital (Vitak, 2012). Frampton and Child (2013) also con-
sidered context collapse and privacy, examining the extent to which people form
social media connections with coworkers. Although most of their participants were
willing to form social media connections with coworkers, organizational norms and
personal privacy concerns also influenced the decision to “friend” work colleagues.
Overall, research in this domain highlights social media as a technology that
connects not only specific friends but also broader friendship networks. Indeed,
some recent evidence suggests the overall configuration of an individual’s friend-
ship network may facilitate or inhibit social capital formation (Brooks et al., 2014).
For example, given the homophily (i.e., similarity) typical among a person’s social
media contacts (Aiello et al., 2012), purposefully introducing diversity to the net-
work may facilitate access to bridging social capital. Although research on social
capital and relational maintenance has proceeded separately, both invoke media
multiplexity theory (Haythornthwaite, 2005), which may serve as a point of ref-
erence for developing theory that addresses how social media use develops both
friendship closeness and network cohesion.
Social Media Friendship and Psychosocial Outcomes
In addition to the infamous Kramer et al. (2014) study demonstrating emotional
contagion via Facebook, other research considers the extent to which social media
relationships produce beneficial or deleterious psychosocial outcomes. Such