The concept of social capital describes the benefits individuals derive from their social relationships and interactions: resources such as emotional support, exposure to diverse ideas, and access to non-redundant information. Social capital is embedded in the structure of social networks and the location of individuals within these structures (Burt, 2005). Because social network sites (SNSs) have the potential to reshape social networks and lower the costs of communicating with (and thus contributing to and extracting benefits from) this social network, SNS use may have social capital implications. This study is among the first to explore the relationship between social capital and specific communication practices on the most popular SNS among US undergraduates, Facebook.

The rapid growth of Uber and analogous platform companies has led to considerable scholarly interest in the phenomenon of platform labor. Scholars have taken two main approaches to explaining outcomes for platform work—precarity, which focuses on employment classification and insecure labor, and technological control via algorithms. Both predict that workers will have relatively common experiences.