Social Media Affects the Way of Communication

Abstract

As social media affects us more today, the way of communication has changed a lot. This paper found that internet provides people multiple ways of communication, thus we need more aspects to keep it in the correct way. The paper revealed that social media shall modify the style and organization of communication as well.

Full text

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Social Media Affects the Way of Communication
Jingjing Gu
Shanghai Wenlai International School, Shanghai, 201100, China
Abstract. As social media affects us more today, the way of communication has changed a lot. This
paper found that internet provides people multiple ways of communication, thus we need more
aspects to keep it in the correct way. The paper revealed that social media shall modify the style and
organization of communication as well.
Keywords: Social Media; Way; Communication; Effect.
1. Introduction
With the advent of technology, the internet provides people with a new platform where individuals
have access to communication with each other more easier and fast. Recently, social media prevails
in people’s daily life by the internet ( Sponcil & Gitimu 2013: 11). People use MicroBlog, Wechat or
QQ as a media to maintain and sustain the relationship with others. There are assorted ways for users
can use them, such as adding comments on specific events, uploading photographs and sharing their
lives whenever they like, all of which attract increasing number of people to apply them. In
information era, social medias are likely that gain popularity quickly among adolescents.
To be specific, high school students spend one to three hours on social medias everyday to get
contact with information, views and files instead of displaying themselves for most of time. (Erdogan
& Mustafa, 2017). A survey on the activities on social media to the students showcases the one-to-
many style, in which they play a role as sender to transfer content to their friends, take an large amount
of part in the communication (Pempek, Yermolayeva & Calvert, 2009). The propose of this paper is
to identify the social media’s impact on the communication concerning the international high student
in Shanghai.
The reason why this study is important is that as social animals, people can not live without
communication or interaction with others. Since the social media gradually occupy people’s lives, it
is vital for the public to know whether social media change their talking preferences and manner. A
research conducted by Donald K. Wright & Michelle D. Hinson in 2008 suggested that the blog and
social media dramatically modify the style and organization of communication.
2. Literature Review
All the studies reviewed for this review of literature used samples whose participants were high
school students aged from 15 to 18. Social media in education has a strong positive influence on
social skills, and there are mainly seven ways teachers used to impart information and knowledge to
students (Wilson & Margus, 2020). The use of social media is also common among children and
adolescents nowadays(O'Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). A limited number of studies research on
how social media or other computer-based mediate interaction influence the style of communication
(Baker & Oswald, 2010).
Carr and Hayes(2015) defined social media as a kind of channel which relies on the internet as a
platform to attract users. People can apply it to present themselves according to their preference and
willingness and interact with strangers or familiar people by chance. Users could achieve values by
the feedback from the interaction with readers or audience in real time or asynchronously.
Youth are inclined to share their experience with others and take part in different activities to make
acquaintance with strangers by using social media ( Parvathy & Suchithra, 2015). The usage of social
media was divided into four parts for High school students : posting picture, updating status, IM, and
just browsing (Parvathy & Suchithra, 2015). The feedback and discussion my affect high school

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students who are still during the period of exploring and establish their own understanding to the
world.
Most of high school students use social media look forward the feeling of popularity by adding
many people as friends, for it is very likely to seem as respect. In addition, the social media satisfies
the demand for individual and inter-personal interaction(Urista, Dong &Day, 2009). As more and
more young prefer to stay on the internet, their social skills, especially the way of communication are
impacted by the people and information online.
3. Method
The participants was composed of xx high school students in China. A convenient and stratified
sampling was sued to acquire the sample. Volunteer students come from different grades and classes
in different international schools. Various high school classes were selected to provide a stratified
sample of gender and age from 15 to 18.
The “ Use of Social Media Questionnaire” was used to collected data. The written questionnaire
was created by the principle researcher with some questions adapted from “Use of social media by
college students: Relationship to communication and self-concept” by Sponcil and Gitimu(2013).
Questions in the survey included the following areas: the frequency on using social media, social
media’s impact on communication, the familiarity to the Internet memes in China, and demographics.
The question on the instrument were designed to satisfy the research questions as set forth in the
introduction of this study. Therefore, the questionnaire was considered to have content validity.
4. Results
The result indicated that a total of 40 high school students responds to the questionnaire. There
were (19) 47.5% females and 21 (52.5%) males included in the sample. Among the participants, 90%
were between the ages of 15-18. Of the high school students sampled, 77.5% were grand three and
22.5% were grade one and grade two.
4.1 Research Question1: What Level of Contemporary High School Students' Familiarity
with Social Media?
Description statistics and frequencies were used to conduct the analysis. To measure the extent of
usage of social media, eight questions were used. The questions were as follows:1)Do you use social
media? 2) How long do you use social media recently? 3)What the frequency about you use social
media every day? 4) Do you think you use social media too much? 5)Please select your most recent
social media usage 6) Please select the social media you have used most recently 7)Why use social
media?
Results showed that 97.5% high school students use social media. The highest score one could
acquire for the frequency of using social media was 100. The mean score was 80.35. Most ( 58.97%)
of participants reported that they think using too much social media and 30.77% participants think
the frequency of using social media is normal. The reason why high school students use social media
varies from people to people, as indicated in Table 1.
28% of them use social media for 3-4 hours per day, 23.08% use social media for 2-3h per day,
20.51% use social media for >5h per day, and the rest of them use social media less than 2 hours per
day. Participants reported that Wechat (87.5%) and Tik Tok(47.5%) were used most normally.
4.2 Research Question2: Whether High School Students Use Internet Memes When They Talk
with Others?
To measure perceived communication skills, eight questions were used. The questions were as
follows: 1) Are you familiar with the Chinese Internet memes of the last year? 2) Whether you will
blurt out internet memes casually when talking to people? 3) Please select the person who will use

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Internet words in the conversation 4) Have you ever had trouble understanding words used online
during a conversation? 5) Online words were used more frequently when speaking face-to-face than
when chatting online 6) Your thoughts on using Internet language more often in daily communication
7) Should people increase the use of Internet terms in their daily life? 8) Do the words people often
say online affect the way you communicate?
The highest score one could acquire for the variable of the level of familiar to the internet memes
is 100. The mean score was 73.05. Most (75.61%)of participants did not have the experience that they
do not understand the internet memes during the conversation with others.
The highest score in the frequency of using internet memes is 100. The mean score is 71.02.
Results of the survey indicated the impact of the internet memes on participants’ communication style.
The high school students use internet memes most (97.56%) when they talk with friends, next
(73.17%) is to classmates, (21.95%) is to family members, teachers and strangers have same
percentage (14.63%). 85.37% of participants reported that they are inclined to speak less internet
memes when they talk with people face to face.
The attitude of the increasing frequency of utilizing internet memes in the sample shows that 36.59%
of participants thought it does not matter, 29.24%of participants thought it is bad, and 34.14% of
participants thought it is good. 73.53% participants reported that they are influenced by the
surrounding which usually speak internet memes during discussion.
5. Discussion
The findings of this study shows that high school students is tightly tied with social media. Social
media becomes a daily routine for most of high school students. Most of them utilize social media is
for entertainment and relaxation, then is due to chat and communication. This can also be proved in
the statement of Sheldon in 2008. Approximately half of participants reflect that they think that they
apply too much of social media and perturb them, but they still continue to use them. This
phenomenon suggests that high school students strongly rely on social medias.
With the deep dependence on social media, high school students put roughly three hours on them
each day from the research. As a result, students are affected by social media enormously. The
research suggests that the conversation are inclined to entail internet memes when students chat with
their friends or familiar people online. 69.2% of participants suggest that they blurt out internet
memes casually when talking to people. These data shows that high school students change their
communication style according to current hot internet memes.
Half of participants claims that they do not concern about the situation of increasing using
frequency in normal conversation. However, there are 40.91% of participants responded that their
communication style are changed if surroundings speak more internet memes.
5.1 Limitations
The number of sample is not enough to summary the overall of high school students. Most of
participants are twelfth Grade students so this study need more ten and eleventh Grade students to
take part in. What’s more, this study applies convenient sample, random sampling will be more
accurate.
5.2 Implications for Future Study
Future studies can focus on why social media change adolescents’ communication style and how
it affects. The main reasons why students use social media are to get contact with others, share
pictures, and figure out what people are doing ( Martin, Wang, Petty, Wang, Wilkins, P213-24, 2018).

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6. Conclusion
The social media impact high school students communication style by studying the frequency of
entailing recent internet memes in the conversation. What’s more, since 77.27% participants do have
experience that they do not understand the meaning of the internet memes when talk with others, the
emergence of social media hinder the understanding to certain of conversation.
Table 1. Why use social media
Why use social media
entertainment and relaxation 95.35%
knowing current issues and news 51.16%
chat and communication 86.05%
observing other's life 32.56%
habit 53.49%
portraying the image 6.98%
filling spare time 48.84%
study and work 58.14%
making new friends 20.93%
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