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Abstract
Keywords
Abstract
Social media’s primary objective to faciliate communication between people now became an effective tool to build relations with friends and groups that hold the same interests, practices and activities. Also, it became a place to express opinions, and platform where issues are discussed. In fact, social media has transformed people’s life. On one hand, it brings people closer. On another hand, it turns people into antisocial by replacing human’s face to face communication with platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter. Apparently, the new generation’s addiction to social media has a number of effects on their lives including sharing their personnel life matters with known and unkown people. This study tries to know the degree of change made by social media in students’ life. In order to achieve the desired results of quality and high efficiency, the study identifies the influence of social media on students; understands the habits of students while using social media and discovers the attitudes of students towards social media.
Keywords
- All kinds of visual, audio and printed media play a major role in a community’s life. The in-crease of the number and variety of mass media has facilitated the knowledge and increased theability to receive news and information from many sources (Soydan, 2012). Social media sitesare one of the most important of these sources. Social media studies have gained importance asa result of an alarming increase in the rate of behavior-related diseases (Mendi, 2015). A studyin 2015 found that there is an increment of more than 20% in social media users worldwidecompared to the preceding year (Küçükali, 2016; cited in Ebizmba, 2015; Sputniknews, 2014).Therefore, it is obvious that social media will have a great impact on human being’s lives be-cause of both usage mass and frequency of usage. Communication Theory warned of misuse ofcommunication tools. With the rapid development of technology, there is a revolution in com-munication. As a result of this revolution, the spread of social media can be seen in both Turkeyand the world. According to the Ipsos survey, 12 out of every 100 people using mobile internetin Turkey installed mobile phone applications. The same source found that the main purpose ofconnecting to the internet from the mobile phone is socializing (Özkoşak, 2016). It is seen inTurkey that the active internet user increased by 5% and the active social media user increasedby 11% (Küçükali, 2012). Today, young generations are using social media and it became partof their life. Many of them spend their time connected on social media to engage with brandsand discuss about products with friends. According to “Young Adult Revealed” 12603 peoplefrom 18 to 24 years old among 26 countries engage online with brands; 28% talked about brandon a discussion forum, 19% added brand related content to their homepage on favorite socialsites (Ahmed, Salamn & Shafiq, 2015). Social media’s revolution makes people think thatspending time on platform such as Facebook is much better than family meeting. People onsocial media share what they did, do and what they are going to do. They don’t care about whocan see their publications or what reactions will they receive. There is no private life and nosense of responsibility in people’s attitude towards all elements. (Ergul and Kurtulmuş, 2014;Bozdağ, 2008). Recently, the increasing dependency of social media games also is affectingindividuals’ lives. In social media games, a meaningful relationship was found between expo-sure or behavior of violent games and aggressive behavior of individuals. Cognitive Theorysuggests that violent behavior is rather a learned behavior than an innate behavior (Avcı andGüçray, 2013; Bandura, 1978). It is seen observed that these games temporarily increase theaggression level in individuals and decrease the pro-social behaviors. Negative emotions, de-pression symptoms and deterioration in human relationships were found in people who play these games more than twenty hours a week (İli, 2013; Parker, 2009).
- As this study focuses on the impact of social media on people’s lives, the methodologyused is survey. It is helpful to know the degree of influence that social media has on people’slives . Firstly, the duration of study is based on the academic calendar of 2018-2019 and it waslimited to social media users from Sakarya University. The study included male and femalestudents aged between 18- 31 years old. Secondly, the copies of the survey were distribuated byhand to the number of individuals required in the university. This way is providing data thatpermit to know the impact of social media on students’ lives. Also, this way permits to reach thetarget easily and precise idea of the point of their views. Finally, to achieve the desired result asurvey was administrated to university students from public relations and advertisement de-partment. The main mass consists of 344 students. Simple random sampling has been used todetermines the simple size. 50 copies of the survey has been distribuated for the study. 48 stu-dents’ responses are considered. The survey consists of 19 questions and it is divided into threeparts. The first part of the survey contains demographical, level and age of participants. Thesecond part of the survey contains questions about participant’s habits and favorite social net-works. And the last part of the survey contains questions that identify social media’s impact on participants’ lives.
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