Doing family on Facebook: connecting communicative affordances of mobile media, parental practices, and social capital

This dissertation examines how mobile media augment practices with predominantly “offline” ties maintained through mobile social media. Specifically, it considers how practices of parents of young children accrue bridging and bonding social capital differently on Facebook’s ego-centric network. To connect communicative processes with social outcomes I draw on ecological psychology, sociology and communication to conceptualize ""communicative affordances."" This framework charts a middle ground between technological determinism and social constructivism. A literature review of social capital as process and outcome and tie conversion follows. Parents of young children were selected as a population of interest because they are at an important life stage, are in need of social support, and are frequent users of mobile media. In-depth interviews (N = 10) were used to illuminate family practices on mobile Facebook—particularly taking, curating, and uploading images and videos of friends and family—and develop survey measures reflecting communicative affordances. An online survey was then deployed to adults with children under five years old (N = 262) and who were users of Facebook and mobile media. As expected, family satisfaction predicted bonding, as did multimediality and mobile availability. Intensity of tie conversion was significantly predicted by scope of unfriending, privacy concerns, multimediality and mobile availability. However, only multimediality and desktop availability significantly predicted bridging capital. Practices were also not universal and varied by gender and race.