Impacts on social capital?

[Shelia Cotten]

What are the impacts of online health information seeking for social capital?

[mench]

In the research I'll present in one of the Medical Sociology sessions, we find physicians who use MedLine for clinical care receive significantly more esteem than their colleagues.
This is true in high-prestige academic hospitals. In low-prestige academic hospitals, the review of a breadth of journals is rewarded.
So we might say that the use of the internet to gain access to 'evidence-based' resources has improved the social capital of some physicians, but the story might be simply one of eased access for those who already would have been opinion leaders...