TTU Students’ Perception of Social Media
Yiting Dong
12/05/2016
Abstract
In
this paper, TTU students’ perception of different issues of social media is
studied. A survey about social media is made for TTU students in order to find
out TTU students’ views on social media. We want to know which kind of social
media sites is the most popular for TTU students; how the social media
influences TTU students’ lives; what the effect of social media is on TTU
students; whether or not social media benefits TTU students’ study or work;
whether TTU students are worried about personal privacy being compromised in
social media; whether most TTU students think their mood would be altered by
some words; how TTU students respond to conflicts in social media; and so on. Based
on the results of survey, various reasons TTU students answer the way they do
are analytically detailed. TTU students have various ideas for different issues
of social media.
Keywords: social media, students, Texas Tech University.
Keywords: social media, students, Texas Tech University.
Introduction
We are from Texas Tech University
(TTU). We studied TTU students’ perception of social media. Recently, there are
various kinds of social media in the world, such as Facebook, WeChat, QQ,
Twitter and so on. Those social media have changed the means through which TTU
students make friends and keep contact. It also makes a possible interaction
for students in different cities and countries, because there are many
international students from different countries at TTU. Social media offer
platforms that everyone can use freely. They give TTU students the opportunity
to share information and the level of interaction is very high, because your
contacts, to whom your message is being carried, are always online. Specifically,
when you send a message, the person on the other side receives it as soon as
possible, and then, the interaction goes on. Even from the perspective of
business, some businessmen deal with business and earn money by using social
media. For example, businessmen use social media to do their advertising for
products, goods and services. In fact, they use social media to connect and
build relationships with customers and future prospects. Social media make the
world talk!
However, just as a famous saying
goes: Every coin has two sides. Although social media bring many benefits for
students, there are exactly some disadvantages to TTU students’ lives of using
social media. Some students believe that communication on social media will
replace face-to-face contact in the future. There are some reasons behind this
attitude. On the one hand, these social media are useful and powerful tools
that have made it much faster, easier and cheaper to keep in contact with
various people in different cities and counties. For example, it is possible
that many research assistants at TTU discuss some research problems with their
professors in different places using social media now. On the other hand, some
students even think that students cannot live without social media nowadays,
especially Internet and Wi-Fi. When students arrive at a place, the first thing
most students do is connect the Wi-Fi, which is a common phenomenon on campus.
Therefore, the general problems with social media are the positive or negative
influenced of social media. In the writing class, my group decided to study TTU
students’ perception of the influence of social media. Social media is a big
topic, and there are many positive and negative effects for TTU students. My
group was interested in various angles: what kind of social media was used for
most students; how long students use social media every day; how to use social
media effectively; etc. From my perspective, I am especially interested in the
personal privacy problem caused by social media.
Literature Review
It is undoubtedly true that social
media contribute to students’ personal development. Firstly, social media can
be functioned to facilitate human memory. “Memory is often selective. But in
this case, the selection is not done by our own mind; it’s done by an outside
resource. So interactive functions on social networking sites can also shape
how we view our experiences, how we view ourselves,” said Qi Wang (Kelley,
2016, para. 2). A research study done by Wang and her co-authors,
“Externalizing the autobiographical self: sharing personal memories online
facilitated memory retention”, was launched to test the function of social
media. The results show that people tend to recall things posted online
regardless of what kind of things. Therefore, as for TTU students, I believe
that they are likely to like remembering things put on social media.
Next, in the article “Stressed at
work? Tell it to Social Media” (Palmquist, 2016, para. 2), the author argues
that social media is a good tool to track people’s emotions and moods in real
time when they correspond to their work and study environment. An unproductive
workplace will cause employees to run late, fall behind, or quit when they just
can’t take it anymore. However,
social media has enabled researchers to analyze large, representative data of
people who offer their observations using a vast number of data, and new sources
of information on social media. Therefore, it is possible that, with the help
of this tracking method, TTU students can raise hope even if they suffer from
large study pressure from a vast amount of homework or failing the exam. It is
possible that families and teachers can clearly know about students’ stress
levels by following what TTU students posted on social media. Finally, social
media is beneficial for students to study (Tomaszewski, 2012, para. 1). Dr.
Richard (Harvard School of Education) and other researchers did a study about
students’ study, and the research results show that students can share their
opinions and dilemmas using social media in the classroom. Furthermore, the
appearance of social media promotes the flow of information and knowledge into
different countries when students study (Karadkar, 2015, para. 4). With the
rise of social media, students may even be learning to read likes and shares
instead of facial expressions (East, 2016, para. 8). Maybe social media are
good tools for improving the level of study for TTU students. Moreover, social
media affects students’ mental health and well-being (Jung, 2015, para. 1). Dr.
Shannon M. Rauch (Benedictine University of Mesa) says the main reasons
students use social media are for self-distraction and boredom relief (Honor,
2015, para. 16).
Although there are some research
results mentioned above verifying that social media benefits individuals, some
research articles argue that social media have great influences on students’
group lives. On the one hand, social media are powerful tools which help
students connect to old friends from primary school, grade school, high school,
and college, and distant relatives who students have lost touch with (Morgan,
2016, para. 1). What’s more, social media allows students to communicate with
each other no matter how far two people are apart (Shlokinani, 2012, para. 3).
Students can not only send messages to receive whether they are online through
social media immediately, but also update their lives by posting some pictures
or words no matter where they are. Furthermore, students can also discover new
interests by being able to see what their friends like or through links shared
by friends and family. However, how many times do TTU students use social media
to contact with old friends every week? Seldom or Usually? Maybe different TTU
students have different answers. On the other hand, social media plays an
essential role in any business groups (Holmes, 2015, para. 1). Holmes explains
how shopping has become digital and consumers find it easier to go online
nowadays. Various networks, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, are evolving
as a medium to communicate with our customers and provide services. “For
businesses today, the best way to keep our company successful, in my
estimation, is to fully embrace social media.” said Holmes. There is a
significant increase in the number of TTU students who use Internet to buy
various matters. Clearly, most businesses have seen a rise from their active
presence on social media.
On the contrary, there are also some
negative impacts for TTU students that are caused by social media. First of
all, students are likely to be jealous if they do not participate in the
activity that their friends post about (Shlokinani, 2012, para. 7). After they
find out about this event, some students tend to wonder why they are not
invited and feel depressed. Secondly, social media causes a negative effect on
society and individuals (Jung, 2016, para. 4). “Social media makes it more difficult
for students to distinguish between the meaningful relationships we foster in
the real world, and the numerous casual relationships through social media,
especially the young,” said Jung (Jung, 2016, para. 3). That is to say, social
media produce a false sense of connection. According to social media, it is
clear that cyberbullying has widely spread among the young. Do the
disadvantages outweigh the benefits using social media? Nowadays many
businessmen use social media to communicate with students, but those social
media can also prove a difference to students who show interest in what their
families and friends put on social media. It is also too difficult to control
when students put something on social media. Posting more personal information
will make students lose more privacy. Therefore, it is probably also an
important topic for TTU students how to protect privacy. Should the government
or relevant authorities set out rules to control it? Then, the long lasting
aftermath of violence has sped over social media (Wayne, 2016, para. 2).
“Contact with violence through any media tends to lead to what is called
vicarious traumatization – may be more upsetting than an unmediated
experience”, said Wayne (Wayne, 2016, para. 6). Additionally, social media cannot
avoid the responsibility of the impact of events, e.g., distress, elevated
stress and so on. Finally, the author states the correlation between the
deterioration of mental health among a new generation people and high usage of
social media sites (Gregoire, 2016, para. 3). It is also possible that there is
a connection between mental health and usage of social media as for TTU
students.
Hypotheses
Because of the mentioned above, I
believed that TTU students in general would be in favor of regulation; I
believed that some positive or negative words on social media, e.g., “like”,
“DO NOT like”, would have an effect on the mood for most TTU students; Most TTU
students would tend to believe that social media had a positive impact on
social lives and study and research; TTU students would tend to be worried
about their privacy because they post some personal information on social
media; Most TTU students would think social media could be helpful to remember
things.
Methods Section
We studied TTU students’ perception
of social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter. From the perspective
of social media, we wanted to know how the social media influenced TTU
students’ lives; what the effect of social media was for TTU students; whether
or not social media benefited TTU students’ study or work; whether TTU students
were worried about personal privacy being compromised in social media; whether
most TTU students thought their mood would be altered by some words; how TTU
students responded to conflicts in social media; and so on. In terms of
parental leave and Black Lives Matter, we wanted to know what the attitude of
TTU students to parental leave and Black Lives Matter is. Moreover, I was
especially interested in the standpoint of TTU students to social media, and I
wanted to know whether TTU students in general tend to be in favor of some
regulation in social media, e.g., the government or relevant authorities taking
steps to protect the personal privacy in social media; whether TTU students
thought their mood would be affected by some positive or negative words in
social media, e.g., “like”, “DO NOT like; whether TTU students would argue that
social media had a positive impact on social lives and study and research;
whether TTU students tended to worry about their privacy since some personal
information was posted in social media; and whether TTU students believed that
social media could be helpful to remember things.
In order to solve the problem
described above, we made a survey about social media, parental leave, and Black
Lives Matter for TTU students, and the survey is given in the Appendix. It is obviously easy to make a simple and
ordinary survey, but it is undoubtedly difficult to make a user-friendly survey
that has an ability to find out what TTU students’ perceptions are. Firstly, we
made many questions focusing on different fields about social media, parental
leave, and Black Lives Matter. Then, we discussed with each other many times
about whether those questions were reasonable or logical. During the course of
the discussion, we put forward a lot of valuable comments and recommendations
to polish this survey. For example, we asked for some basic information, e.g.,
age, sex, and position, at the beginning of the survey, in order to be
beneficial to statistics and analysis of data; we made some appropriate changes
for some questions whose answers were obvious and apparent; we tried to reduce
the number of open questions, which made it more convenient for TTU students to
finish the survey; and we added some appropriate options for some questions
whose options were not comprehensive. Even after discussion, we were required
to submit comments if we believed there were some places that should be
revised.
Next, we made an agreement for
everyone, in order to collect the data efficiently from TTU students in a short
period of time. Everyone in the class needed to ask TTU students to finish the
survey, at least 6 American males and 6 American females and ourselves. All the
students being investigated and required to finish the survey were from TTU.
However, there was still a problem. Although we were pretty sure that the
male/female ratio would be close to 50/50, it was obviously not representative
in terms of every student, because TTU students were not able to get surveys anywhere.
We wanted to find out perceptions of TTU students. Therefore, we planned to
collect at least 300 useful and effective surveys. After all, the more, the
better. That is to say, the more data, the more convincing results are
obtained. Finally, we used Google Sheets, where we could create a Google Sheet
and edit with others at the same time, to input and collect data.
Results Section
Fortunately, we finished exactly 296
surveys, which included 150 surveys from males and 146 surveys from females.
That is to say, the male/female rate was close to 50/50. However, the
proportion of undergraduates was 67.2%, while that of graduate and
faculty/staff/other was 28% and 4.8%, respectively.
We believed that TTU students in
general would be in favor of regulations in social media. However, the result
of the survey was different from what we expected, and just a few TTU students
firmly believed that they should be in favor of regulations. As for one
question about personal privacy in the survey, “Should the government take
steps to protect the personal privacy in social media,” only 33.8% thought that
the government should take steps to protect the personal privacy in social
media, whereas 27% said there was no need to protect the personal privacy in
social media; nevertheless, 39.2% believed it should depend. Moreover, undergraduate
students were less likely to support government’s control on social media. As
for students who would be in favor of regulations, 62.6% were undergraduate,
33.3% were graduate and only 4% were others. For TTU students who were clearly
not supportive, the proportion of undergraduate students reached 70.9%, but
that of graduate students was 24.1% and that of others was only 5.1%. For
another question about violent scenarios, “Do you think posting violent
scenarios in social media sites is controlled enough?” the results were a
little different from that of the former question. Most TTU students believed
that posting violent scenarios was not controlled enough in social media sites.
There were totally 45.4%, which was much larger than the number of TTU students
who thought the government should take steps to protect the personal privacy,
who believed that posting violent scenarios was not controlled enough
obviously. 27% argued that this phenomenon was controlled enough and 27.6% were
not sure about it.
We thought that some positive or
negative words in social media, e.g., “like”, “DO NOT like”, would have an
effect on the mood for most TTU students. In general, most TTU students did not
say that their moods were altered because of those words. 55.7% said that
“like” or lack of them would not alter their moods, whereas 26.8% said yes.
There were still 15.1% who were not sure, and only 2.4% who argued they never
used them. Furthermore, in the number of TTU students whose moods didn’t be
altered by those words, the male rate was 55.6%, which was larger than the
female rate, at 44.4%. On the other
hand, females were more likely to be affected than males. As for the people who
believed that those words would alter their moods, the male and the female
rates were 47.4% and 52.6%, respectively.
We also believed that most TTU
students tended to think that social media had a positive impact on social
lives and study. From the results of the survey, most TTU students thought
social media would have a positive effect on social lives and study. As for the
question, “Do you think social media can be helpful for better studies,” 55.7%
believed that it was definitely helpful, whereas 44.3% said that it wasn’t. Moreover,
the data was not the same for different genders. Namely, 52.1% of males and
59.4% of females supported the idea that social media would benefit better
study. As for another question, “Do you think social media has a positive
impact on your social life or a negative impact”, the number of positive,
negative and not sure was 48.6%, 15.3% and 35.7%, respectively. For this
question, male and female rates maintained an amazing consistency, 48.3% and
49%. We also investigated how much TTU students thought social media helped
them to have a dialogue with the people they didn’t know. 62.1% thought social
media helped sometimes, whereas 31.7% didn’t think so. However, males and
females had different ideas for this problem. Most females, 65.5% thought
social media helped them to have interactions with someone who they didn’t
know. But the rate was 58.8% of males, which was much fewer than that of
females.
We thought that most TTU students
were worried about their privacy because they tended to post some personal
information on social media. However, different people had different
opinions. 36.6% said it was obvious that
the personal privacy would be compromised in social media, whereas 28.1%
believed that they were never worried about the personal privacy problem in
social media, but 35.5% argued that they were worried about personal privacy a
little. In terms of gender, 33.1% of males didn’t believe the personal privacy
would be compromised in social media, but the figure was only 22.9% for
females.
We thought most TTU students
believed social media would be helpful to remember things. However, just a few
TTU students thought social media was helpful to remember. There was only 26%
of respondents who thought social media was beneficial for them to remember things,
and 74% disagreed with it. Furthermore, 36% of undergraduates said that social
media benefited for them to remember, whereas only 15.9% of graduates thought
social media could help them, and no faculty or staff believed it would help
them to remember.
Discussion Section
We found that most TTU students in
general would not be in favor of regulations in social media. We thought that
the possible reasons for this phenomenon were as follows: Firstly, as for most
TTU students, their personal privacy in social media may not have been
violated. Therefore, they may have felt no need to impose additional steps to
protect the personal privacy in social media. Secondly, it was possible that
they felt that whatever social medium they used was doing very well for the
personal privacy protection, so that most TTU students could be assured when
putting some personal information on social media, and didn’t think that the
government should take steps to protect the personal privacy any more. Finally,
it was also possible that most TTU students didn’t care whether their personal
privacy was violated or not, so that they didn’t care whether the government
should take steps to protect students’ personal privacy or not. But there were
still a few students who worried about this problem. Females tended to be more
worried about the privacy protection than males. Maybe females would like to
pay more attention to the privacy protection. However, this phenomenon may be
caused by the limitations of the survey. We wanted to find out whether TTU
students were in favor of regulations in social media, but there were only two
questions in the survey; one was about personal privacy protection and the
other was about violent scenarios. If we want to find out more information
about whether TTU students are in favor of regulations in social media or not,
we should add more questions about regulations in the survey in the future.
We found that most TTU students said
that they did not have their moods altered because of some positive or negative
words in social media, e.g., “like”, or “DO NOT like”. We thought there were
some possible reasons for this phenomenon. It was possible that some TTU
students didn’t use those positive or negative words on social media, so that
they said that their moods weren’t altered by those words. It was also possible
that the most important role of social media for TTU students was to put some
information or ideas to express in there, not to get feedback from others.
There was another interesting phenomenon: in the number of TTU students who
said that they didn’t feel their moods were altered, the male rate was 55.6%,
which was larger than the female rate, at 44.4%. It was possible that males
were more likely to deny any subtle influences on their moods.
We also found that most TTU students
thought social media would have a positive effect on social lives and study.
There were some possible reasons for this. First, it was possible that most TTU
students would discuss some learning problems on social media, which tended to
benefit their study. Next, it was also possible TTU students maybe use social
media to connect to old friends from primary school, grade school, high school,
and college, who those students had otherwise lost touch with. Furthermore,
most TTU students may share some interests and make new friends on social
media, which would be beneficial to students’ social lives. However, the data
was not the same for different genders in some respects. We investigated how much TTU students thought
social media helped them to have a dialogue with the people they didn’t know.
The number of females who thought social media helped them to have interactions
with someone who they didn’t know, was much larger than that of males. It may
be possible that females prefer to contact friends on social media, while males
like to do other things, e.g., sharing interests, playing games and so on.
Finally, we found that just a few
TTU students thought social media was helpful to remember. It was possible that
most TTU students used social media to have fun or share interests, rather than
remembering things. Moreover, most TTU students put some information that may
be not relevant to remember on social media. However, this phenomenon may not
mean that the social media didn’t influence them, because they were just
denying that social media was helpful to remember. We thought that we had
better add more questions about how many students didn’t like the memory
function or others in the survey in future, so that we could find out more
information about whether TTU students were just denying that social media was
helpful to remember or not.
Conclusion
In this paper, we studied TTU
students’ perception of the influence of social media. Firstly, we did a
literature review of the current research results on social media. Next, some
interesting hypotheses were proposed to predict TTU students’ perception of
various issues of social media. Methods section was introduced to illustrate
what methods we wanted to use to study TTU students’ views on social media. The
results from the survey were given, and we made a detailed analysis of the
results. TTU students had various ideas for different issues of social media. Most
TTU students in general would not be in favor of regulations in social media. Most
TTU students said that they did not have their moods altered because of some
positive or negative words in social media, e.g., “like”, or “DO NOT like”. Most
TTU students thought social media would have a positive effect on social lives
and study. Most TTU students were not worried about their personal privacy
because they tended to post some personal information on social media. Finally,
just a few TTU students thought social media was helpful to remember.
Appendix
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