Kobayashi, Tetsuro, Ken’ichi Ikeda, and Miyata Kakuko. “Social Capital Online:  Collective Use of the Internet and Reciprocity as Lubricants of Democracy.” Information, Communication, and Society 9 5 (2006): 582-611. Print.

In this article Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko argue that the internet promotes social capital in that trust and reciprocity are cultivated through participation in online communities.  The authors also point out that the accumulation of social capital vis-à-vis online communities is often a good indicator for political engagement in rational civic discourse over the internet.  The author even make the claim that this participation in rational civic discourse over the internet often translates into an increased political presence in RL and a heightened sense of democratic values.

Recapping Coleman and Putnam’s seminal study on social capital, Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko note that social networks with a collective set of social norms usually lead individuals participating in those networks to the “fruits of mutual cooperation” or the mutual benefits that are often the result of a critical-rational collective act of problem-solving.  Further, if the group is somewhat heterogeneous, this civic debate played out over various CMC acts as a “school of democracy” that engenders a heightened sense of “political efficacy and generalized trust” (584).  The authors also recognize that “generalized reciprocity” or karmic yoga is usually practiced by individuals participating in online social communities.  Because of the nature of CMC (static, often text-driven), the visibility of reciprocal communications encourages similar karmic responses in “lurkers” or other non-forum types.

The authors also recap the two sides of the debate over the internet as a medium that encourages democratic political values by noting how the creation of heterogeneous (optimistically) and homogeneous (pessimistically) spaces either confirms of negates the internet as a part of the Habermasian public sphere.