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Over the past decade, online social networking has grown faster and has rapidly changed the nature of social relationships. As millions of photos, videos, and texts are posted every day, social media has become central to online visual cultures around social experiences, such as self-portraits, brands, self-presentation, friendships, and civic engagement (Hampton, 2011; Johnston et al., 2013). Particularly, online interactive features have become one of the most essential communication tools for establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships with various networks of people (Ellison, Vitak, Gray, & Lampe, 2014). Hashtags, for instance, allow social media users access to relevant information and select the most favorite or related content from other users. Instagram is strategically designed to facilitate communication among people’ connections through the respective networks. By tagging an image with a hashtag, social media users can not only connect with their close friends and family, but also communicate with new people (Nov & Ye, 2010). This often provides more opportunities for individuals to participate in the communication process within their network as they increase interactive and bidirectional communication between sources and receivers.
Bourdieu (1986) defines social capital as the resources inherent in more or less formalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition. The aggregation of the actual or potential resources emerge as the connections of individuals are built through mutual acquaintance and recognition (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Social capital resides within a network of connections among members of specific social relationships and offers many benefits to social networks such as self-esteem, education, life satisfaction, and civic engagement (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000). Though there has been scholarly attention on the relationship between the effects of interactive features such as tags or hyperlinks on social media use and social capital, the existing review of the literature in this area showed that little scholarly attention has been devoted to Instagram alone, particularly hashtags. Therefore, using an online survey of college students, this is the first study to explore the association of Instagram use with bridging social capital (heterogeneous network) and bonding social capital (homogeneous network) as well as how the use of hashtags on Instagram relate to online civic engagement.