Social Media Applications: Are the youth Addicted?

Social Media Applications: Are the youth Addicted?

Abstract–Social media (SM) has seen an exponential growth since its inception on the web, making it an interesting and unexplored area of research. The positives and the novelty of the SM sites have resulted in its integration to our daily lives. Unfortunately, there are repercussions to its adoption, including but not limited to uncontrollable daily dedicated hours; loneliness creating the need to use it and causing more loneliness as the end product; addiction arising out of pleasure, etc. This paper aims to study the SM usage pattern of a sample of students from United States and India, and gauge the pattern and relate the same as symptoms of addiction.

Keywords–Social media, Addiction, Usage, Facebook

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper involves the study of social media sites (SMS) in the context of two countries (India and the United States of America) in two different continents (Western Asia and North America). The authors believed that comparing the behaviors of users of SMS from two countries will shed some lights on this important subject and spur further research. This research is in two parts, namely, the impact analysis of SMS in general and a more focused impact analysis on Facebook. The first part will be represented in this paper.

The pervasiveness of the social media (SM) into mainstream culture and its integration into every life of people in all nations of the world has made it an active research. The advent of the Internet has brought about the ubiquitous nature of SM. Research in social media, which is often called social media analysis, has its root in social sciences, particularly, sociology, psychology and anthropology. While there are many variants in the definition of social media analysis in the literature, we would adopt one that defines it as the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, and other connected information/knowledge entities. Social media analysis represents a complex mathematical modeling of connectivity and relationships. Our research will be focusing on the social media occurring on the Internet. Although, this research utilizes some aspects of social media analysis, relating to the

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behavioral analysis of social media users, the bulk of the analysis is on the usage of SM websites. We investigate the manner in which users access SM sites, the impact analysis will include an examination of the addictive nature of the SM sites.

This paper is organized as follows: first, we will provide a historical background of the five SMS addressed in this paper. Second, we will discuss the current research on SMS and their impact analysis. Third, we would address the methodology used in this research along with the research questions. Fourth, the results and findings will be presented. We would discuss impact analysis on the basis on addiction. Lastly, we would be followed by concluding remarks.

1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF SM SITES

Social media sites, social media application and social media service are used interchangeably in the literature. Although, social media is used in many other contexts, it is becoming increasingly synonymous with building relationships via the World Wide Web. Following the argument presented in [1], we would prefer the use the term “social media,” which they claimed connotes “looking to meet new people or initiating relationship.” According to them, many large SMS users do not necessarily engage in “networking.” They define SMS as web-based services that allow individual to construct personal profiles for public or semi-public consumption; articulate “friends” to share connections with; and surf information of other notable users within the confines of the systems.

III. REVIEW OF LITERATURE

In this section, the review of studies related to social media and various aspects related to it, have been considered. The review of empirical studies has been undertaken to observe which areas have been explored and which need further investigation, in order to formulate the objectives and undertake productive research. The review has also been undertaken to earmark the problem areas related to social

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media. Besides, these studies would provide an insight into the various efforts directed towards better understanding of the complexities of the social media.

The recent report by Ofcom, an independent regulator and competition authority for the United Kingdom communication industries described their qualitative and quantitative analysis research to gauge social media sites in the wider media literacy, online and communication contexts; to profile peoples’ use and understanding of networking sites; and to understand the associated privacy and safety concerns of social media sites [2]. According to Ofcom, social media sites are most popular with teenagers and young adults just over one fifth (22%) of adult internet users aged 16+ and almost half (49%) of children aged 8-17 internet users. It was also reported that some under-13s are by-passing the age restrictions on social media site with 27% of 8-11 year olds who are aware of social media sites say that they have a profile on a site. The same report indicated that the average adult social mediaer has profiles on 1.6 sites, and most users check their profile at least every other day.

The EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) in its Research Study on Social media Sites supported the findings by Ofcom as indicated above (ECAR 2008). According to ECAR, the extent of social media sites use has increased dramatically with considerably 95.1% of users aged 18 and 19 years using social media as opposed to 37% users aged 30 and older. Other findings of ECAR included: Facebook has the most users with 89.3%; majority of the users (55.8%) spend 5 hours or less on social media sites and 26.9% between 6 and 10 hours; half of the users utilize social media sites to communicate with classmates about course-related topics; fewer than one-third of users are very concerned or extremely concerned about the misuse of their information, security problems, cyberbullying or cyberstalking, or leaving a history that could cause them problems.

The study “Facebook Addiction:Factors Influencing an Individuals Addiction”, in [3] suggests that though internet addiction has been studied but social media addiction has not been researched. The study investigates how factors such as personality, gender, procrastination, boredom and ones values may affect amount of time they spend on facebook. It further concludes that they are either overly possessive about the usage thereof or not. The research conducted was a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques, using scholarly articles that focused on personality types and Internet addiction. Based on the results from the qualitative study, quantitative survey instrument was devised, which includes likert-style statements that test personality type, values, boredom and procrastination.

The article titled, “3 Reasons You Should Quit Social Media in 2013” discusses the UK study which proves that over 50% of social media users evaluated their participation in Social media websites as having a negative effect on their lives. Comparing themselves to others (family, friends, peers) was a blow to their self-esteem. And stalking by ex or his/her husband/wife is considered worse.

Psychologist Dr.MichaelFenichel describes FAD as a situation in which Facebook usage “overtakes” daily activities like waking up, getting dressed, using telephone or email checking. According to Joanna Lipari, a clinical psychologist at University of California, LA, discusses some signs of Facebook addiction as:

1. Losing sleep over FB. Staying logged in throughout the night and eventually getting too tired for the next day;
2. As a bench mark spending one hour or more on FB is too much;

• Being obsessed with exes who reconnect on FB;

1. Ignoring work for FB;

1. The thought of getting off FB leaving the user in cold sweat;

In article [4] “Status update: Facebook Addiction Disorder”, opines that the user is suffering from FAD, a disease referred to by psychologists, if he/she has more online friends than real life friendships. Also, if the user checks the FB more than 5 times a day (spending hours updating the status) or if checking the facebook account is the first thing that he/she does in the morning.

The study, “Facebook a more powerful addiction than alcohol [5], reveals that the pull of checking one’s facebook page can be more powerful than addiction to alcohol or cigarettes. As in 2012, scientists claim that 350 million people suffer from this condition.

The reason cited by FB addicts have been:

1. The urge of human interaction and the ease of it through FB/twitter;
2. Getting a message on FB/twitter is exciting since it feels like someone is interested in “me”.

To check this urge to be on FB page, a web application can be used, which shuts off the computer after the user has spent a pre-determined amount of time. (NEwsChannel9WSYR, 2012, “Study: Facebook a more powerful addiction than alcohol, cigarettes”)

A medical study titled , “Microstructure Abnormalities in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder” by Kai Yuan, Wei Qin, Guihong Wang, Xuejuan Yang, Peng Liu, Jixin Liu, Jinbo Sun, Karen M. von Deneen, JieTian reveals that long-

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term internet addiction would result in brain structural alterations, which probably contributed to chronic dysfunction in subjects with IAD. The study sheds further light on the potential brain effects of IAD. The areas that were affected in the people who were diagnosed with IAD are thought to govern emotional processing, executive thinking skills and attention, and cognitive control. What’s more, the brain changes found in this study are thought to be similar to those involved in other kinds of addictions like alcohol and drugs.

A study by University of Chicago Booth School of Business states the desire to frequently check your social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, among other social media sites, can lead to a stronger addiction than those who are addicted to alcohol or cigarettes.

The study was done by giving 205 adults, ages 18-85, Blackberries and sending them tweets seven times over 14 hours a day for seven days. The study quotes that “Texting and checking Facebook and Twitter come in just below sex and sleep on impossible to resist urges,

Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C in their study “The Benefits of FB “friends”: Social Capital and college students use of online social media sites” provide the scale items to judge the addiction of Social media, viz.,

1. Facebook is a part of my everyday activity

1. I am proud to tell people, I am on Facebook

• FB has become a part of my daily routine.

1. I feel out of touch when I haven’t logged onto FB for a while.
2. I feel I am a part of FB community.

1. I would be sorry if FB shut down.

• Approximately how many FB friends do you have?

• In the past week, on average, how much time Per Day have you spent actively using

FB?

Foremski Tom in his article, “Facebook ‘Likes’ can reveal your sexuality, ethnicity, politics and your parent’s divorce”, discusses the study which included researchers from Cambridge’s Psychometric Centre and Microsoft Research Cambridge Researchers. The researchers analyzed a dataset of over 58,000 US facebook users and developed a model that could predict whether a man was homosexual 88% of the time, and 75% of the time for women; ethnic origin (95%), gender (93%), religion (82%), political affiliation (85%), if they use addictive substances (75%) and relationship status (67%).

Also, Frank Agyemang, in his article, “Infected with Facebook Addiction Disorder?”, refers to a study by Cambridge University suggests that contrary to the belief, it aids in people

to be more sociable giving people more choice as to how and with whom they conduct their relationship.

Haisha Lisa in her article “Is your Facebook Addiction a sign of loneliness? discusses a unique aspect of Facebook Addiction which differentiates it from the other types if addictions. Unlike addiction to drugs, alcoholism, and sex, where the guilt is a major factor, the Facebook addict feels that they have reasons to be addicted, since they claim to be doing business. Some are self-employed professionals looking for clients, some are job seekers trying to network for a new job, and some are corporate employees trying to extending their company’s message. Their time on Facebook is actually escapism disguised as working. Also, most of the people are addicted to their past-reconnecting with their friends, old classmates, former lovers, etc.

In another research on social media [6], focused on students’ performance in an online course offered at the National Cheng-Chi University in Taiwan. They found that social media that serve advising roles have positive impact on students’ performance and that networks that are adversarial have negative impact.

The review of the available literature reveals that studies have included various aspects of Social media Addiction (with special reference to Facebook) including-its symptoms; positives of Usage, also its negatives; implications and impact of Social media Addiction. The studies listed here, also included are the professional opinions of the psychiatrists and psychologists regarding the influx of SM cases especially FAD cases.

1. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Purpose of the Study

The research study will investigate the daily usage of social media and how people interact with social media sites on a daily basis. The focus will be on how often people use this tool to converse with or keep current with their friend’s social or personal lives. The significance of the study is to examine the impact of social media has on its users and the merits and demerits of social media, particularly, the aspect that pertains to dysfunctional behaviors. Research questions include:

1. What is the threshold for social media usage to be classified as dysfunctional, such as causing addiction disorder?
2. What are the differences in social media usage in geographical context? In this case, we would compare usage in Western Asia (India), North America (United States).

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The research design that will be used in this study is based on the mixed research model. This m odel is chosen in order to achieve full potential, including benefits of mixed methodology and to provide a comprehensive investigation of the research questions. These benefits include: 1) the ability to engage in both inductive and deductive reasoning, 2) allows qualitative approach to complement the results of the quantitative approach and vice-versa, 3) maximizes the advantages of quantitative and qualitative methodologies and m inimizes the demerits, 4) applies both objective and subjective points of view, 5) allows researchers to choose explanations that best produce desired outcomes, 6) researchers’ values play a large role in the interpretation of results and 7) mixed model is pragmatic and more realistic and serves as the middle ground for the positivist and constructivist theories [7]. These benefits of mixed model are of great importance to this study. The open-ended questions are intended to complement the closed-ended questions and

(U would be prefixed with the code) and India(I, would be prefixed). The Coding for various aspects is

1. Tsp Time spent on SMS

2. FTM First thing in the morning

3. LTN Last thing at Night

4 A.SWL Social media is the way of life.

4 B. SMA Social media is Addictive

5 A. HPH spending too much time online is Harmful to Physical Health

5 B. HMH spending too much tim e online is Harmful to Mental Health

Symptom I

The Time Spent (TSp)

One of the most important symp toms of Social media Addiction is the amount of time spent online. Psychologists suggest that if more than an hour is being spent on SM websites, the chances of being aff ected are high.

vice-versa to help produce stronger analyses and desired outcomes.

The qualitative approach of this research stu dy will utilize

content analysis based on open-ended question s of the survey

questionnaire. Content analysis is chosen for this research

because it is well suited to the study of the          methodical and

description of the content of recorded human c ommunication.

Babbie [8] defines content analysis as “any technique for

making    inferences     by     objectively    and     systematically

identifying specified characteristics of messages.”

Judgment sampling was used to study 151         Under-graduate

students from Delhi University and      120    from Fayetteville

State  University,  Fayetteville,  North  Carolin a,  USA.  The

questionnaire was sent to 1000 respondents but as a limitation,

only 151 and 120 respondents respectively filled it up. The

quantitative portion of this research study will i nvolve a cross-

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sectional approach for data collection. This data analysis will utilize statistical package provided by Goog le Docs. The percentage of the total agreement has been taken by adding the strongly agree and agree percentages, a nd same for disagreement level. The simplicity of the met hod, combined with the qualitative discussions, would give us the real crux of the comparison. To keep it simple, the agreeme nt level of the two set of respondents is compared and conc lusions drawn accordingly. For this study, we will be using Google Forms’ spreadsheet that keeps the responses.

1. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

The purview of the paper is to study the various aspects of Social media affecting the respondents from the United States

Fig. 1: Time spent by respondent s from US and India.

The two set of respondents, I (Ind ian) and U (United States of America), are analyzed and comp ared.

ITSp- 62% of users spend more t han an hour on SM websites, every day.

UTSp- 58% of respondents from US spend more than an hour daily.

Both set of users fall in the danger area of being addicted, since they are using it for more than an hour. An hour and more from the day, that is o therwise packed with very important activities.

Also, when discussed informally with some of the respondents a very interesting observation has been made. The respondents shared that since all popular social media sites had developed

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their “Apps” for their smart phones, which were far more convenient than logging on to the website, they access them numerous time in the day. At the same time, they shared that since they had their smart phone with them all the time, it was impossible for them to ascertain the time spent on these websites. Though not possible in quantitative terms but qualitatively it can be laid down that most of the respondents have been spending more than an hour and hence a problematic for their psyche and at the same time a potential for the brands to promote themselves.

Symptom 2

Last Thing in the

Morning

Respondents from US and India

Fig. 3: Accessing SMS last thing at night (LTN).

FTM First thing in the morning

The basic reason for the inclusion of this symptom is that something of immense importance or something that you slept over would a respondent do the first thing in the morning. Hence, in case the respondents access their social media accounts first thing in the morning, it emphasizes the paramount importance of SM sites to them.

First Thing in Morning

Respondents from US and India

Fig. 2: Accessing SMS first thing in the Morning (FTM).

The analysis reveals an interesting aspect that only 25 percent of Indian respondents access social media websites FTM as compared to more than half (54%) of the respondents from US. This symptom is more pronounced in US respondents as compared to Indian respondents.

Symptom 3

LTN Last Thing at night

This symptom is extremely important not only to establish whether the addiction exists or it doesn’t but also to infer that it is not healthy. The scriptures of many religions and also the psychological health groups emphasize that the last thing we do before sleeping off determines to an extent how well we sleep at night, which in turn affects our mental health.

The practice of logging into the social media websites last thing before going to sleep is prevelant in both set of respondents, more than half are indulging in it. If compared more respondents from the US(76%) as compared to Indian respondents(67%) are in the habit of checking their social netwroking accounts before going to sleep.

The psychological interpretation for the same cant be good. Religion tells you to chant before going off to sleep, psychiatrists tell you to either read good books or think of all the good things you did in the day. Basic reason is to make the mind calm before going to sleep. In today’s busy life, getting a good night sleep is the only respite our brain gets. Logging on the various SM websites would mean, either viweing other people’s lives (Facebook), getting more career advise and connections (linkedin), getting advice from novices or peeping into the lufe of celebrities (twitter), etc. None of which can have calming affect on the mind of the user.

Symptom 4

4A WLF Social media is the way of life.

4B SMA Social media is Addictive

This parameter was important to study since the acknowledgement of this statement can be construed as a positive sign, which can lead to the acceptance and then of course responsible use