Impact
of Social Media on the Texas Tech Community
Rafikul
Islam
12/06/2016
Abstract
We surveyed about 300 people out of 33,000 people of
the Texas Tech University (TTU) community to get the impact of social media on
the Texas Tech community. We found that the
TTU community believed that social media can be used to change the
society. The TTU community females
believed that use of personal information might not hamper their personal
privacy. The TTU community use social
media for making news, checking news, and shopping. Most of the TTU community like it when
Facebook posts their memories. Finally,
we found that the TTU community tries to avoid using social media during the
classes.
Introduction
We decided to study the effects of use of social media
on the TTU community. Either people use social media for making friends, or
people use social media for making social changes by doing some social
activities. People also might make
social networking to keep contacts with friends. Social networking might be
developed in Facebook,
Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other similar existing sites.
Social
media has seven building blocks: uniqueness, discussions, sharing, existence,
associations, status, and groups (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). These building blocks might be used to do a
lot of useful works like marketing a product, communication, and expressing
opinion. The uses of social media are
vast. People might use social media for
different purposes. Li et al. showed
that people might use social media for expressing their opinion to others (Li, Li, & Zhu, 2016). Although the application of social media is
vast, using social media during the class for non-class purposes might have bad
impact on the students’ learning. Now,
people think about the effect of sharing personal information in social
media. Some might think that personal
privacy can be hidden by changing social media settings. Also, people might think that personal
privacy might be hampered due to the use of personal information in the social
media. In this project, we analyzed how
people think about all the above cases.
However, we did not study how good are the social media or how we should
control the use of social media. We
studied how people think about the social media.
Literature Review
The uses of social media are
versatile. Social media also are used
for communication among friends. Especially
teens use social media for communicating with their friends (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). Sometimes it may have bad effects on the
teens due to sharing of personal information in the social media. Facebook is very popular to the teens as most
of them use Facebook for communication with each other (Lenhart, 2015). Almost 24% of teens use social media
constantly (Lenhart, 2015). The awareness of the parents is necessary
about their children’s use of social media (O'Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). The solutions of bad uses of social media are
important (Barnes, 2006). Teens share a lot of personal information in
the social media, which may be harmful for them (Madden et al., 2013). Sometimes, they share their personal
information for fun only (Correa, Hinsley, & De Zuniga, 2010). Parents are
trying to find out the problem of social media for their children (Yardi & Bruckman, 2011).
A recent article showed the enhanced
use of Social Media for the academic and non-academic purposes (Swanson & Walker, 2015). The use of Social Media during the classes
for non-academic purposes might have bad impact on the students’ grade, because
students may not concentrate on the classes due to the use of social media in
the class period (Kornhauser, Paul, & Siedlecki, 2016). However, it might not have bad impact to use
Social Media for the academic purposes.
It was observed that the use of Twitter for the academic purposes
enhanced the performance of the students for a course (Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2011). In that class both students and instructor
used Twitter to maintain communication among students and instructor for
academic purposes.
Hypotheses
In this work, we as a group of ESL
5315, Texas Tech University, decided to study Texas Tech students’ (TTU)
perception about social media; our group was interested in use of social media
for promoting social awareness, impact of social media on the social life, for which
social media is used mostly, use of social media in building networks with
people, government control about social media, social media for expressing
opinions, use of social media during the classes, and use of social media for
the study purposes. I was mostly interested in use of social media for
promoting social awareness, use of personal information in social media, use of
social media in expressing opinion, and use of social media during the
classes. The survey questions about
social media is attached in the Appendix
A. The survey questions were prepared by our members of academic writing
class. Each member submitted five questions initially. Our instructor selected the appropriate
questions among the total questions submitted by the group members of academic
writing class. It is recommended to the interested reader to read the survey
questions to get better idea about our survey. We hypothesize that people use
social media for doing social change through sharing news, films, and social
awareness issues. Although people use
social media for making friends mostly, now people might think to use social
media for changing society by sharing news and creating social awareness. We analyzed the TTU community’s perspective
about use of social media for social change.
We premised that females worried more about hampering personal privacy
in social media due to the use of personal information in social media. We reasoned that either females are more
concerned about hampering personal privacy in social media or they think there
is little effect on personal privacy due to the use of personal information in
social media. We hypothesized that
people use social media to express their opinion. People might post their opinion in social
media for getting responses from his social media friends and followers about
their opinion. Therefore, people in the TTU
community also might think that people can use social media for expressing
their opinion. We also hypothesized
that people like such Facebook activities as when Facebook posts their old
posts or memories. Usually, people like
to be reminded of their old good memories.
However, people also might be unhappy by seeing their bad memories in
Facebook posts. We analyzed TTU
community perceptions about such activities of Facebook. Finally, we hypothesized that people may
think that using social media during the classes might hamper students’
results. People might think that
students become unable to concentrate to the classes due to the use of social
media in the classes. Therefore, people
think that it is good to avoid mobile phone during the classes to get
concentrated in classes.
Methods
Texas Tech University is the public university, which
is one of the largest research universities in the world. The enrollment of Texas Tech University is
about 33,000. There are huge variety in
TTU community. From all part of the
United States, students come to Texas Tech University for purpose of
study. Also, all of international
students from different countries come to Texas Tech University to do research
as well as to study in different
disciplines of Texas Tech University. In our academic writing class, we
performed a survey in the Texas Tech Community. Our academic writing group
surveyed 300 students from approximately 33,000 Texas Tech students. We had approximately 24 group members. Each member took data from at least 13
informants of the Texas Tech Community. Among 13 informants, 12 were American, and the
other could be any including internationals, or anyone we wanted. Also, there
were at least 6 males and 6 females among 13 informants. We collected
information from informants randomly at different locations of TTU, for
example, Student Union Building, Library, and academic departments of TTU. The survey consisted of 36
questions. Eighteen questions were
related to the social media, nine questions were related to the parental leave,
and rest of the questions were related to the Black Lives Matter. I analyzed the data related to the social
media questionnaires. Our group took demographic information,
and opinions about Social Media usage, Black Lives Matter, and Parental Leave.
In this project, we had three groups, and these groups analyzed data about
Social Media usage, Black Lives Matter, and Parental Leave separately. I, myself, was one of the members of Social
Media usage group. My groups had some
questionnaires about Social Media usages.
We mainly asked informants about their demographic information and how
they felt about the Social Media usages.
The demographic questions included class (either they are undergraduate,
graduate, faculty, staff, or other), sex, age, and origin of the informants (either
they are from Texas, USA but not Texans, or international). We also asked one question about their family
(either they have child or not). The
Social Media usage questions were about how people think of Social Media as a
tool for social changes, positive or negative impact of Social Media usages,
how many hours they spent on Social Media per day, what Social Media people use
mainly, compromise of personal privacy in Social Media, usages of Social Media
during the classes, government actions to protect personal privacy, and how
people respond to conflicts in Social Media.
We also tried to get information about what the most popular social
media people use most frequently every day is.
In addition to that, we asked one question about how people make
dialogue with the people they do not know, and what is their passion for using
social media applications. Our
informants were interested to fill up our survey. Our questionnaires gave us enough information
that we wanted to get from this survey.
We asked most of the questions by giving them some options to answer the
questions. However, we could arrange the survey questions in different
ways. For example, we might ask them to
write their opinion about the impact of Social Media usages and overall how
they felt about the whole survey without giving them options. In those cases, we might get better data
about the survey. We surveyed only 300
Texas Tech University students, who were not very representative among
approximately 33,000 TTU students. However, we surveyed approximately equal
numbers of male and female representatives in this survey. Therefore, our pool was representative in
male and female distribution. We did not perform our survey in locations of TTU
community like the Business school, Law school, TTU campus housing, or other
places. Therefore, our pool was not very representative about the possible
locations among the locations of TTU. Our survey was restricted to the TTU
community only, and hence our results might not be representative of other
school communities, because the TTU community might be different from other
school communities in different ways, for example, in demographics, age, and
originality. Also, other school community representatives might have different
perceptions about the usages of Social Media.
At the end of the survey, we used
Google Sheets to process the information that we got from the informants. The Google Sheets were shared among all group
members, and our group members inserted their survey responses in the Google
Sheets. Each group member inserted
information from 13 informants. We
counted the number of people answering each question based on sex, class
(undergraduate, graduate, or Faculty/staff), origin of the informants, and
other criteria. We extracted data from
our local commuter Excel sheet for analyzing data because Excel sheet is more
user friendly than Google Sheets.
Results
The most important part of a survey to analyze the
survey questions carefully. In this
section, we analyzed our results based on the hypotheses we made in the
hypothesis section of our report. We surveyed almost 200 undergraduates, 80
graduate students, and some faculty and staff at Texas Tech University. Our informants included nearly equal numbers
of males and females. They were mostly
between 18-22 years old, and they were mostly Texans. The informants expressed their opinions about
social media usage. Most of the people
use social media more than 2 hours per day. As per our survey results, 70
percent of informants use different social media for more than 2 hours per day.
We found that most of the people use Facebook frequently. These numbers of
people are more than 120 out of almost 300 people in the Texas Tech community.
Also, we found significant users in Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
We found 50 informants use Snapchat, 45 use Twitter, 40 use Instagram, and
another group use LinkedIn. However, these people might use those social media
less frequently than most who frequently used social media.
We hypothesized that most of the
people use social media for making social change through sharing news, films,
and social awareness activities. We found that almost 120 informants believed that social media might
contribute to social changes. Only 60 people believed that it might have a
contribution to make to social awareness. Other people were confused about this
statement. These people thought that social media might be used for only making
friends, doing communications, and checking news. Also, some people thought
that it might not contribute at all to change the society. This number was less
than ten.
We assumed that females would be more
concerned about personal privacy being compromised in social media. However, most of the females believed that
personal privacy is not hampered due to the use of social media. Only 20
percent of female informants believed that using personal information in social
media may hamper personal privacy, and almost 10 percent of females believed
that using personal data in social media might cause a little hampering of
personal privacy. During collection of information, some females also said that
compromising personal privacy depends on the users, because users can hide
personal information in social media by changing settings in social media. Therefore, other people might not get any
personal information about those users unless the users disclose their
information to the others by changing settings in social media. The males were not so much concerned about
the hampering of personal privacy in social media. More than 55 percent of males thought that
using social media might not hamper personal privacy at all.
We expected that people use social
media to express their opinion. However,
we found different results from our expectations. Most of the people believe
that they use social media for checking news. Some people use social media to
make new friends, and few people use social media for shopping purposes. As per our survey results, 165 people use social
media for checking news, 55 people use for making friends, and others use it
for shopping purposes. We also got some
comments about this question about whether social media is used to express
opinions or for other purposes. Only 5-10 people commented that we use social
media for other purposes.
Facebook posts people’s old posts or
memories after one year or more than one years.
We hypothesized that people might like when Facebook posts their old
posts or memories. As per our survey results, more than 50 percent of people
like it when Facebook posts their memories or old posts. Almost 30 percentage of people said that they
do not like it when Facebook posts their memories or old posts. Other people were not sure about such
activities of Facebook. This question
was answered by majority of the people we surveyed for our academic writing
research project.
In addition to that, we hypothesized
that students do not agree to using social media during the classes. According
to our survey results, more than 60 percent of people said that they try to
avoid using social media during the class hours. Among them some people commented that use of
social media hinders their concentration on the instructor’s lectures. Some people (less than 6 percent) thought
that the use of social media does not have a bad impact on the classes. Also, some people said that it is bad to use
social media in the classes, but they do it in the classes, and only 50 people
believed that it is okay to use social media during the classes. Some people
verbally told us that they use social media when they do not understand the
instructor’s lectures. However, people
sometimes blame the instructors for their own lack of concentrations in the
classes. It might be another reason that
parents push their children to study such things that children do not like, and
children are unwilling to concentrate the class.
Discussions
We tried our best to collect
information from the Texas Tech community about impact of social media on the
society. We surveyed about 300 people
out of 33,000 people of the Texas Tech University community. This number might
not reflect a good representation of the TTU community. We mostly surveyed people from the Student
Union Building and Library. We might not
also have gotten information from all academic departments of the TTU
community. Therefore, our informants
were not good representations in academic department distribution. Our survey informers were mostly
undergraduates. Therefore, our survey might be more representative of
undergraduates than others. The graduate students were much fewer than
undergraduate students. Therefore, our survey may not reflect a good
representation of the graduate students at TTU community. Also, we surveyed few
faculty/staff. Thus, our survey might not reflect a good representation of the
faculty/stuff of the TTU community.
We hypothesized that people use
social media to change the society by sharing news, films, and awareness
activities, and we found that a high number of people of the TTU community
believe that social media might be used to change the society by sharing news,
films, and awareness activities. People
might have believed this hypothesis because in this modern time people use
social media to get news and other social activities. Also, in this time, it is
very easy to get news by social media. Some people did not agree to this
hypothesis. There might be a lot of
reasons for such disagreement. Those people might think that they may get
completely wrong news when some people share wrong news in social media
deliberately. Also, they may think that social media is for only making
friends, and it is not for changing the society. Some of the people were
confused to give their opinion about the use of social media for making social
changes. Those people might think that
it may be true for some cases and for some other cases it might not contribute
at all to changing the society. For
example, they might think some young people waste a lot of time using social
media without doing their own work. In
those cases, use of social media might impart a bad impact on those
people. On the other hand, they might
think that social media might contribute to changing the society by sharing
news, because people get news easily by using social media.
We hypothesized that females
compromise their personal privacy due to the use of personal information in
social media; however, we found that most of the females of the TTU community
believed that compromise of personal privacy depends on how they use social
media. They may think that social media has an option to hide personal
information. Therefore, people can use
this option of social media to use their personal information and hide that
information so that only they can only see that information. Some females were concerned about use of
personal information in social media.
They might think that in some cases social media accounts may be hacked
by others. In those cases, the personal
privacy may be hampered even though they use the privacy option of social media
to hide their personal information. Most
the males of the TTU community were not concerned about the use of personal
information in social media, and they thought it was okay to use personal
information in social media.
We hypothesized that people use
social media to express their opinions, but we found that the TTU community
believe that they use social media for different purposes. The TTU community
use social media for checking news, making friends, and shopping. The reason to use social media for the above
purposes is that people use social media for enjoyment purposes. We found people use social media for shopping
purposes because most of the sellers give advertisements about their products
in the social media. Therefore, it is
very easy to get a lot of information about different products in the social
media. People use social media to make
friends because it is easy to communicate with friends in the social media.
Most people like when Facebook shares
their old posts or memories. Nowadays, people want to have more information
with the least amount of work. People do
not need to remember their old posts because Facebook shares their old
posts. Some people were not concerned
about this issue. They said that it is
just okay because they are not enjoying such activities. Some people might not like these activities
of Facebook because Facebook might post bad memories of those people. Finally, it might be true that people like
such activities of Facebook because people usually post the good stuff in
Facebook, and therefore they might enjoy it when Facebook posts their previous
good stuff.
We also premised that most of the TTU
community do not agree to using social media during the classes, and we found
that most of the TTU community try to avoid using social media during the
classes. People might think that the use
of social media during the classes hampers their concentration to concentrate
the instructor’s lectures. Some people
said that it is okay to use social media during the classes because they might
think that the use of social media does not restrain their ability to
concentrate on the class. Some people
might use social media during the classes when they become unable to understand
the lecture’s contents. They might think
using social media may help them to spend class time instead of listening to
the instructors.
Conclusions
Our group got information from the
informants about the impact of social media on the TTU community. We surveyed about 300 people out of 33,000
people of the Texas Tech University (TTU) community. Our informants were interested to complete
this survey. In our survey, it was found
that TTU community believed that social media can be used to change the
society. The females of the TTU
community thought that use of personal information might not hamper their
personal privacy. The TTU community used
social media for making friends, checking news, and shopping. Most of the TTU community like Facebook activities
when Facebook posts their memories.
Finally, it was found that the TTU community tries to avoid using social
media during the classes.
Our results are not a good
representation of the TTU community, because our survey was not a good
representation of all departments of Texas Tech university, graduate students,
and TTU faculty/staff. Another serious
limitation of our survey is that we only surveyed about 300 people out of
33,000 people of the Texas Tech University (TTU) community. The higher number of people included in the
survey, higher the accuracy in the survey results. Moreover, some of our survey
questions were not good enough to get information from the informants. It might have some confusions to the informants.
Also, in our survey, we had less number
of opinion questions. For getting clear
information, the opinion questions play an important role. It is usual to make survey questions as clear
as possible to get clear information from the informants. In addition to that,
our survey results are limited to the Texas Tech Community. Therefore, our survey results might not be
good representative to other communities in the United States. However, our survey results might have some contributions
to other communities because university communities have some similarities
things.
Our survey might be a good
representation of the TTU community once we had majority of the TTU community
included in our survey. Our survey
results may also be good if we surveyed all departments of Texas Tech
University. In the future, the survey
results might be made representative of TTU community by doing the survey
randomly at all locations of the TTU community.
In that case, the majority of the TTU community should be included in
the survey. Also, our survey results
might be used universally by doing survey in different university communities
in the United Sates. In future, we try
to get information form as much as people possible from Texas Tech Community as
well as from other communities in the United Sates to use survey results
universally. Also, we will make survey
questions as clear as possible to get clear idea from the informants.
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Appendix
A: Social Media Survey Questions
Thank you
for filling out our survey! (Social
Media, Parental Leave, Black Lives Matter)
Demographic Questions:
1.
___ Undergraduate ____Graduate ____ Faculty/Staff/Other
2.
___ Male
____Female
3.
Age ____ 18-22 ____ 23-28 ____ 29 or more
4.
Where are you from, originally? ___ Texas
___ USA, not TX ___international
5.
Do you have a child/children? ___ Yes ___ No
Survey
Questions on Social Media
1- Do
you use social media as a tool for social change? For example, sharing news,
film, or an article that you think is important for promoting social awareness
regarding an issue?
___ Often ___
Sometimes ___ Rarely ____ Never ___
N/A don’t know
2- How much do you think social
media helps you to have a dialogue with the people you don't know? ___ meet a lot of people I didn’t know
___ sometimes ___ doesn’t
help/rarely ___ N/A
3- Do
you think social media has a positive impact on your social life or a negative
impact?
___ positive ____
negative
____ N/A, not sure, no impact Why?
4. How long do you use social media each day?
____ > 4 hrs/day ___ >2 hrs/day ____>1 hr/day ____
>1/2 hr/day ____ <1/2 hr/day
5. If you were allowed to use only one social
media application what would it be?
___ Facebook ___ Snapchat ___ LinkedIn ___ Instagram ___Twitter ___ Any other ____________
6.
What is the social media tool you most
frequently use every day?
___ Facebook ___ Instagram ___ Twitter ___ other:
__________________________________
7. What
is your passion for using social media applications?
___ Checking news ___ Making
new friends ___ Shopping ___ Other: _______________________
8. Are
you worried about personal privacy being compromised in social media?
___
Yes ___ No ___ A little
9. Should the government take to protect the personal
privacy in social media?
___ Yes ___ No ___ It depends
10. Do “likes” or lack of them alter your mood? ___
Yes ___ No ___ Not sure
___ N/A, Never use
11. When reading posts on social
media, would you rather use simple “likes” and facial expressions to give
posters feedback instead of detailed feelings and comments?
___ Yes
___ No ___ It depends N/A,
Never use social media
12. When socializing online, do you find memories are easier
to recall when social media posts previous photos and events?
___ Yes ___ No ___ N/A, Never
use social media
13. Do you like it when Facebook posts my “memories” or old
posts. ___ Yes ___ No ___ not sure/NA
14. Do you think posting violent
scenarios in social media sites is controlled enough?
___ Yes ____ No _____ Not sure/N/A
15. What is your opinion about using social media during the
class for non-class purposes? (choose the best) ___
always do ___ do & think it’s
ok ___ do but it’s bad ___ try to avoid it
16. Do you think social media can be
helpful for better studies? ___ Yes
____ No
If yes, how does it help?
17. Do you use social media to help you remember things to
do every day? ___ Yes ___ No
18. How do you respond to conflicts
in social media? __ Avoid
___ Stir up ___ Work for peace
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