Exploring Social Tagging Behavior from the Perspectives of Online and Offline Cultural Capital and Social Capital

Social tagging is a recent popular Web 2.0 application. Some technology optimists have claimed that social tagging ushered in a free tagging environment which allows every user an equal opportunity to articulate his/her thoughts and join the construction of common semantics. However, empirical studies of social bookmarking systems and tag usages indicated that the variations existed among users in the frequencies of URL bookmarking, tag uses, and activeness in tagging. These suggest that participation in the construction of social tags and the common semantics behind them may not have been as equal as suggested. The behavioral differences in tagging thus become a topic worthy of studying. This study explored users’ social tagging behavior from the perspectives of cultural capital and social capital, which were derived from the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, and other theorists’ analytic frameworks. To examine the impact of cultural and social capitals on tagging behavior, this study examined their workings in offline and online forms.
Adopting a quantitative approach, this study surveyed the users of Delicious.com, a well-known social bookmarking website. Online questionnaire was used to assess users’ possession of offline and online cultural capital and social capital and their tendencies of social tagging including their motivations in self-oriented tagging and social-oriented tagging, level of strategic tagging and the level of tagging imitation. Inferential statistical procedures were used to examine the complex relationships between the offline and online cultural and social capitals as well as the impact of various forms of social/cultural capitals on the tagging behavior.
The study results revealed two major findings. First, homological relationships existed between the offline and online forms of the two types of capital, particularly in cultural capital. Exchangeable relationships could also be observed between the two types of capital’s offline and online forms. Second, Delicious users’ offline/online cultural capital and offline social capital affected the behavior of self-oriented tagging; offline/online social capital affected social-oriented tagging; offline/online cultural capital and offline/online social capital both affected tagging strategies usage; offline/online social capital affected the behavior of tagging imitation. The findings suggest that the offline/online cultural capital may affect one’s contribution of new tags into the entirety of social tags, and online social capital may affect one’s participation in the construction of common semantics. User roles may be characterized by the degree of tag contribution and participation, which resulted in the distinctions of leaders and followers. It may shed lights on the observations of the power relationships among tag users and the common semantic construction.