Table 7.

The Process of Grounding in Social Media

In social media, two factors significantly influence the process of grounding21,110: fearfulness and reputation enhancements.

As we have seen previously,21 fearfulness is a key adaptive affective trait supporting the levels of cooperative concern and care. And given the power of social media in generating emotional contagion, collective emotions of social media communities play a critical role in driving their decision. Chung and Zheng110 demonstrated that in these communities, influential users tend to express intense emotions of fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. In particular, fearful emotions (anger and fear) are very effective in driving influence in social media communities.

However, given the influence of reputation enhancements, communities of practice in social media tend to be centralized: a small number of people at the “center” of the community are connected to many more individuals in the “periphery.” So, more frequently from what happens in physical communities, ideas are filtered through a powerful social influencer.

Finally, Cheng et al.80 pointed out that the characteristics of digital communities generate an unequal distribution of social capital. In them, social anxiety is caused by being overly sensitive to flaws in one's public behavior, which might make other people criticize them, while loneliness is caused by the feeling that one's interpersonal relationships are not as they would like them to be. Putting them together, social enhancement is linked to high preferences for, but low problems, in social relationships, while social compensation is linked to high problems in social relationships and high preferences for online social relationships. Summarizing, levels of online social capital go up when there are no relationship problems (like high social competence and low social avoidance) and when people use social media actively (e.g., psychological engagement, self-expression). On the other hand, these benefits do not happen when there are problems in relationships (like high social deficits or a lot of conflict between people), when people use social media passively, or when both things happen.