Is Social Media Still Acting as a Socialization Tool?

Wong, Huey Chin (2018) Is Social Media Still Acting as a Socialization Tool? Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

The development of technologies has revolutionized social media. Nowadays, social media has become one of the most important platform to connect people from all over the world as an interactive and effective communication tool. Basically, social media has been broadly used as a communication tool in various form, such as expressing through words, photos and videos. It has been created for the users to build up and maintain their relationships with each other without any geographical or time constraints. This research is therefore attempted to understand the usage of social media and the purpose of using social media today, as social media has been expanded its role as purely a socialization tool to more usage and purposes in various fields. Therefore, this research discussed on the usage and role of social media, whether it is still acting as a socialization tool between the users, or it has been diluted to other purposes such as the educational or organizational fields. However, the impact of social media to the society still consists a lot of questions yet to be answered. Hence, the impact of social media in various field is studied in this research, to see how social media is affecting the society in different fields. The results provided indicate the relationship between the pattern of use in social media and the purpose of using social media. This research also examined the role of social media in various field, whether it is a potential platform which brings impact to the society by improving the skills and performance of the users in certain fields. Uses and gratifications theory and media dependency theory are applied in the theoretical framework in this research. This research is carried out by using survey questionnaire on Facebook users aged between 18-27 years old who lives in Klang Valley area, because these target audiences exposed to social media the most as they live in urban area. The results of this research showed that the social media users are less contributing contents in social media, which directly affected the socialization in social media. However, the impact of social media in educational and organizational fields are studied, which bring certain supports and improvements to the users in certain fields by playing different important roles with the features in social media. Lastly, the future suggestions to the future research will be conducted in this field is provided to illuminate the uncertainty of the research.