"And only the internet remains..." - The importance of ICTs in building and maintaining social capital of selected migrant groups

The paper will present the results of the project "ICTs as tools for sustaining and creating social capital of selected migrant groups". It explored how internal and foreign migrants use social media (sm) to transfer, sustain, and create different types of social capital, how it affects trust, ties with origin groups, and relationships in host communities. Based on the analysis of virtual diaries of online activity and IDIs with students of Warsaw universities, it was shown that the transfer of contacts to the virtual sphere should be evaluated in nuanced way. In general, sm has little potential to create social capital, being primarily a form of maintaining existing relationships. At the same time, especially at the initial stage of migration, the internet is an important tool for acquiring information about the destination (more so for internal migrants than foreign migrants), establishing new relationships (mainly by internal migrants), and maintaining ties with the place of origin. Thus, it is a space of direct confrontation with mechanisms related to the use of resources of bonding and connecting capitals. Active use of sm has the greatest impact on the development of social capital, but study, work, and all other forms of face-to-face relationships are the best circumstances for building/developing bonding capital. Sm can be a source of strong intra-ethnic bonding social capital for Eastern European migrants, as well as bonding capital for various non-European migrant groups. People from Belarus and Ukraine use it in a different way than other migrant groups, that is, they use different communication channels to contact of their community of origin and others to contact the host community; in sm common in the host community they are passive, while in media specific to their own group they are active. This attitude can make it difficult for them to fully integration. Immigrants from outside Europe are more open to making friends online, mainly with other foreigners. At the same time, the more intensive the migrants' direct contacts with other migrants and with representatives of the host community, the more critically they view the reliability of information and the quality and importance of online communication. Immigrants from non-European countries with extensive virtual networks of migrant friends pointed out the risks associated with an illusory sense of belonging to a community, making numerous but superficial acquaintances. For Eastern European migrants, membership in online groups is mainly pragmatic (looking for housing, jobs). By internal migrants, the creation of extensive virtual networks of acquaintances is seen as an investment in case face-to-face relationships loosen and for fear of missing out on some important event. Virtual migrant networks carry less trust than face-to-face relationships, and can lead to the closing of an individual within groups consisting of similar people. The general level and culture of trust in a given host country affect online relationships, both of an intra- and intergroup nature. The highest trust in both acquaintances and information obtained online is declared by non-European foreigners, who have the smallest real network of friends.