“FACEBOOK” AS A VIRTUAL SOCIAL CAPITAL FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE

Facebook the most popular social communication network in our time takes more people’s attention gradually with its approximately 70.000 active user. Used especially by the young people to get in contact with the close and distant environments, to build new friendships, Facebook has entered almost all areas of life as a social capital. Generally, social capital is a phenomenon which is used to explain different relations among individuals and formed in the axis of communication form, social norms, and mutual trust. There are three dimensions of social capital. These are; (i) bonding social capital including close / informal individual relations, (ii) bridging social capital based on formal societal relations, (iii) maintained social capital which provides the affiliation of physically apart individuals through the social webs. The aim of this research is to reveal university students’ attitudes and evaluations through facebook as a virtual social capital area. 300 university students attending in Ankara University participated in this research. Data of the research has been reached by interviewing correlatively with them. “Scale of Facebook Social Capital”, “Scale of Facebook Attitude” and “Scale of Life Satisfaction” as tools of data collection have been used by making validity and reliability analysis. The relationship among scales has been examined by doing “Pearson Correlation Analysis” and the effect of chosen socio-demographic determinants on social capital has been confirmed with the “Multiple Regression Analysis”. In conclusion, it is stated that there important relationship among all subscales of the facebook social capital, attitudes regarding facebook and life satisfaction. Furthermore, it’s found that gender and intensity of the internet usage are effective over attitudes regarding facebook as a virtual social capital