A Study on Usefulness of Social Networking Sites Among Modern Youth Students in Salem District, Tamil Nadu

Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

A Study on Usefulness of Social Networking Sites among Modern Youth Students in Salem District, Tamil Nadu.

Dr.E.Jothi Assistant Professor Department of Commerce Sona College of Arts and Science Salem-5 TamilNadu.

Abstract India currently has a total population of over 1.36 billion people (it’s the second most populous country). The introduction of the government’s Digital India initiative resulted in the country’s digital population amounting to approximately 560 million active users as of January 2019. Of that population, 351 million or 70% are active social media users in 2019. Nevertheless, the social network users in the country were expected to be almost 448 million in 2023. The average social media user in India is considerably younger. Social networking sites in India, particularly southern states, has been growing at a rapidly. With vast and remarkable changes taking place in world, so the researcher wants to analyses the usefulness and how it impact the students’ community. For the present study, 150 college students who are modern youth students were selected from various colleges in Salem District by using convenience sampling technique . All the 150 respondents were the users of online social network sites. The researcher found that 60% of the respondents accepted that social media absolutely affects the lives of college students. So the researcher concluded that today’s students have to balance the relationship between social media and academic study.

Keywords- Social networking sites, College students, Social media

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 382 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

I.INTRODUCTION

In today’s society, especially our generation, social media has become a part of our everyday lives. We have access to all types of information in the palm of our hands through our cell phones, iPods and other handheld devices. They can provide us with a weather forecast in ten seconds or less, e-mails, banking, and most importantly, social media. Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., has taken the technology world to a whole new level. Although we see how it can serve as a positive thing by being a good source of communication, it can also serve as a negative thing such as cyber bullying. Initially, social media was used for making online friends, developing relationships, business contacts and interacting with global masses. Recently, it has been used for mobilizing youngsters for social causes as well. Social media differ from traditional or industrial media in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. The average social media user in India is considerably younger than the global average, with more than half of the platform’s Indian user base aged or younger.

II. SOCILA MEDIA IN INDIA

India currently has a total population of over 1.36 billion people (it’s the second most populous country). The introduction of the government’s Digital India initiative hand in hand with the increasing internet penetration over the recent years, resulted in the country’s digital population amounting to approximately 560 million active users as of January 2019. The traffic in the world’s second largest internet market at this stage was largely dominated by mobile internet users. Of that population, 351 million or 70% are active social media users in 2019 with the ease of internet access, the number of social media users in India stood at 326.1 million in 2018. This increase is relatively lower as compared to the growth that occurred between 2016 and 2017. Nevertheless, the social network users in the country were expected to be almost 448 million in 2023. Facebook remained the popular choice among the social media platforms as of 2017. (Source: STATISTIA 2020).

Facebook recorded 28 million new users in India in the past year, but just 5 million of these 18% used mobile devices to access the service. Overall, however, 72% of India’s social media users log in via mobile devices, and it is predicted that this proportion will increase in the coming months as mobile internet access accelerates further. The average social media user in

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 383 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

India is considerably younger than the global average, with more than half of the platform’s Indian user base aged or younger. In addition to the obvious benefits to the individual better access to education, financial services and health information-such assistance should also help the marketer, providing a powerful, direct way to reach one of the world’s most untapped audiences.

2.1 History of online social networks

Social media are Internet sites where people interact freely, sharing and discussing information about each other and their lives, using a multimedia mix of personal words, pictures, videos and audio. They appear in many forms including blogs and micro-blogs, forums and message boards, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, social bookmarking, tagging and news, writing communities, digital storytelling and scrapbooking, and data, content, image and video sharing, podcast portals, and collective intelligence.

1969: CompuServe was the first major commercial Internet service provider for the public in the United States. Using a technology known then as dial-up, it dominated the field through the 1980s and remained a major player until the mid-1990s.

1971: The first email was delivered.

1978: Two Chicago computer hobbyists invented the bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meetings, make announcements and share information through postings. It was the rudimentary beginning of a small virtual community. Trolling and flame wars began.

1979: Usenet was an early bulletin board that connected Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

1984: The Prodigy online service was introduced. Later, it grew to become the second-largest online service provider in 1990, with 465,000 subscribers compared with CompuServe's 600,000. In 1994, Prodigy pioneered sales of dial-up connections to the World Wide Web and hosting services for Web publishers. Subsequently, it was resold repeatedly and now is part of AT&T.

1985: The America Online (AOL) service opened.

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 384 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

1989: British engineer Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland), on what was to become the World Wide Web.

1992: Tripod opened as a community online for college students and young adults.

1993: CERN donated the WWW technology to the world. Students at NCSA (National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign displayed the first graphical browser, Mosaic, and Web pages as we know them today were born.

1994: Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) started Geocities, which allowed users to create their own websites modeled after types of urban areas. Geo Cities would cross the one million member mark by 1997.

1997: The Web had one million sites. Blogging begins sixDegrees.Com lets users create profiles and list friends.

1998: Google opens as a major Internet search engine and index.

1999: Friends Reunited, remembered as the first online social network to achieve prominence, was founded in Great Britain to relocate past school pals.

2000: In the world of business and commerce, the dot.com bubble burst and the future online seemed bleak as the millennium turned. Seventy million computers were connected to the Internet.

2001: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and world's largest wiki, was started. Apple started selling iPods.

2002: Friendster, a social networking website, was opened to the public in the U.S. and grew to 3 million users in three months. AOL had 34 million members.

2003: MySpace is another social networking website, was launched as a clone of Friendster. 2003: Linden Lab opened the virtual world Second Life on the Internet. LinkedIn was started as a business-oriented social networking site for professionals.

2004: Facebook is another social networking website, was started for students at Harvard College. It was mentioned to at the time as a college version of Friendster.

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 385 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

2005:Bebo, an acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often, was started as another social networking website. News Corporation, a worldwide media company founded by Murdoch, with holdings in film, television, cable, magazines, newspapers and book publishing, purchased MySpace.

2006: MySpace was the foremost popular social networking site in the U.S. However, supported monthly unique visitors, Facebook would deduct that lead later, in 2008.

2007: Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook. Beacon sent data from external websites to Facebook so targeted advertisements might be presented. The civic action group MoveOn.org and lots of others protested it as an invasion of privacy.

2008: Facebook surpassed MySpace in the total number of monthly unique visitors. Meanwhile, Facebook tried unsuccessfully to buy Twitter. Bebo was purchased by AOL. Later, AOL would re-sell the relatively-unsuccessful social media site.

2009: Facebook ranked because the most-used social network worldwide with quite 200 million. The site's traffic was twice that of MySpace. Citizen journalists everywhere were electrified when Twitter broke a tough news article a few plane crash in the Hudson River.

2010: Facebook's rapid climb moved it above 400 million users, while MySpace users declined to 57 million users, down from a peak of about 75 million. Apple released the iPad tablet computer with advanced multimedia and Internet capabilities. AOL sold the relatively- unsuccessful Bebo social media site to Criterion Capital Partners (CCP).

2011: Social media were accessible from virtually anywhere and had become an integral a part of our daily lives with quite 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets sent through Twitter every day, and a couple of billion video views a day on YouTube. 2012: Ever more people are connecting to the Internet for extended periods of time. Some 2 billion people round the world use the web and social media, while 213 million Americans use the web via computers while 52 million uses the internet via smartphone and 55 million use it via tablets.

2013: YouTube topped one billion monthly users with 4 billion views per day, and launched paid channels to supply content creators with a way of earning revenue. Facebook user total climbed to 1.11 billion. Twitter had 500 million registered users, with quite 200 million active. Apple's

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 386 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

customers have downloaded over 50 billion apps and therefore the company again improved iTunes, even as iPads were revolutionizing social games.

2014: Despite having been acquired by Facebook in 2014, this instant messaging platform exists as an independent entity. It arrived on the scene much than Facebook, but has been ready to capture the imagination of many of people across the world by giving them the power to communicate and share instantly with individuals and groups. The Whatsapp call feature is simply the icing on the cake!

2014:Justin.tv shuts downs to focus work on twitch.tv defunction. Snapchat launches collaborative based on events. Amazon acquires twitch.tv for Rs.970 million. Orkut is shut-down by Google.

2015: defunction, milestone Friendster shuts down due “the evolving landscape in our challenging industry” and lack of engagement by the web community. Pinterest announces the launch of buyable pins, a special sort of pin which will be accustomed to make purchases within pinterest itself. The creators are Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett. Discord a free instant messaging and video/voice calling service (VoIP) designed for the gaming community, launches

2016:Microsoft says it will be acquiring LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, and is expected to finalize the deal by the end of 2016. Time Inc. buys Myspace and its parent company. Defunction, Milestone Yahoo discontinues its services for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris clients in early August 2016. It will now only support Yahoo Messenger on Android, iOS, and web clients. Defunction Vine announced that Twitter would be discontinuing the Vine mobile app, later renamed to "Vine Camera". AcquisitionCNN acquires Beme, with the terms of acquisition remaining undisclosed.

2017: MilestoneSnapchat files for its IPO, and begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The share closed at 24.48, giving the company a valuation of around US$33 billion. DefunctionBeme shuts down on January 31st, following its acquisition by CNN in 2016.

2018: Discontinue Yahoo messenger has discontinued in July 17, 2018 in India. Because of not show any good response of the messenger from their customers. Discontinue Path announced

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 387 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

about the termination of its service in September 17, 2018. Path said that the service closed down in October 18, 2018.

2018: Facebook Number of actives users per month: 1.59 billion approximately. Whatsapp Number of actives users per month: 1 billion approximately. Wechat Number of actives users per month: 697 million approximately. Instagram Number of actives users per month: 400 million approximately. Twitter Number of active users per month: 320 million approximately. Google+ Number of active users: 300 million approximately. Skype Number of active users per month: 300 million approximately.

(Source: STATISTIA and TNW 2019) Figure 1 Number of people using social media platform 2.3 Review of literature

Wang, Chen and Liang (2011) alleged that social networking is completely affecting students’ effectiveness also as their grades. Therefore, educators got to be worried about these problems and plan to find better ways to unravel these problems. Though, framed within an educational context, the concepts outlined here are often wont to investigate the utilization of communication technology not only at school, but also at reception, workplace, and many other settings, and for a diversity of different viewers like teenagers, young adults, the elderly, or families.

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 388 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

Kalpidou, costin, & morris, ( 2011) pointedout that the connection between Facebook and well-being appears to become positive over the college years, possibly because upper-class students use Facebook to attach socially with their peers and participate in college life (Kalpidou, Costin, & Morris, 2011).

Jacobsen, & forste, 2011 almost 25 percent of students’ time on the Internet is now spent on social networking websites (Jacobsen, & Forste, 2011) Palmer, Boniek, & Turner ( 2014) Another study focused on how different types of social media use enabled college students to stay in touch with friends and family. Interviews were used for this study as well. “Our students reported that technology interfaces with friend connections is more complex and nuanced ways. Facebook was a popular interaction tool for undergraduates. In fact, Facebook was the social network of choice”.

Heffner (2016) alleged that the utilization of social media are often an honest outlet to affect academic frustrations, especially if the students are in touch with another student that is having the same problem. Social media lets students to urge connected with other students, which may be very useful because it’ll allow them to debate class matters via social media.

“The relationship between Facebook and well-being appears to become positive over the college years, possibly because upper-class students use Facebook to attach socially with their peers and participate in college life (Kalpidou, Costin, & Morris, 2011).” Therefore, “we got to confine mind that the advantages of this interactive technology far outweigh the risks,” says Leri. “When it’s used in a positive way, it can be an extraordinary tool (Brydolf, 2007)”. Almost 25 percent of students’ time on the web is now spent on social networking websites (Jacobsen, & Forste, 2011)

2.4 Importance of the study

To address the difficulty of the effectiveness of using social networking, the primary question raised during this study is: for what purpose is that the student utilizing social networking? Online social networking sites in India, particularly southern states, has been growing at a rapidly. With vast and remarkable changes taking place in world, so the researcher wants to analyses the usefulness and how it impact the students’ community.

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 389 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

2.5 Objective of the study

1. To analyses the effectiveness of online social networking sites. 2. To analyses the usefulness of social media as a tool for communication. 3. To identify the strong and weak points of students’ use of social networking for study 2.6 Research methodology 2.6.1 Geographical area of the study

The location of this study is Salem district in Tamil Nadu

2.6.2 Research Design

The researcher used description study an accurate description of a situation or association between variables will be emphasized.

2.6.3 Sample of the study

For the present study, 150 college students were selected from various colleges in Salem District by using convenience sampling technique . All the 150 respondents were the users of online social network sites.

2.6.4 Method of data collection

To know the response, the researcher used questionnaire method. It has been designed as a primary research instrument. Questionnaires were distributed to respondents and they were asked to answer the question given in the questionnaires. The questionnaires were used as an instrumentation technique, because it’s a crucial method of data collection. The researcher also collected the secondary data from magazines, research books, intranet and internet (websites) etc.

2.6.5 Tools used for analysis

 Simple percentage

III. RESULT AND DISCUSSIONS

 56% of respondents are male and remaining 44% of respondents are female.

• Maximum 53% of the respondents were fall in age category of 13-19 years.

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 390 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

• Majority 50% of the respondents were Under Graduate.

• 66% of the respondents are using Smart Phone to access SNS account.

 82% of the respondents are spending Rs.400 p.m. for internet connection

• 68% of the respondents are using SNS to communicate with Friends.

• Majority 25% of the respondents were using SNS for more than 3 hours per day.

TABLE-1 USAGE OF SN SITES BY THE RESPONDENTS

USAGE OF SN SITES BY NO OF S.NO THE RESPONDENTS RESPONDENTS PERCENTAGE

1 Facebook 27 18% 2 Whatsapp 42 28%

3 Facebook Messenger 18 12% 4 LinkedIn 0 0% 5 Skype 6 4% 6 Twitter 16 10% 7 Hike Messenger 12 8% 8 Google+ 18 12% 9 Instagram 9 6% 10 Wechat 3 2% Total 150 100% (Sources: Primary Data)

 The above table shows that Majority 28% of college students are using Whatsapp for message sharing and chatting.

 25% of the respondents are using SNS for more than 3 hours per day.

 66% of the respondents are using Smart Phone to access SNS account

 96% of the respondents are feel that SNS necessary for college students

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 391 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

 79% of the respondents were strongly agreed that the Social Net Working sites were used for sharing information and experience, watching movie, sharing video, picture ,music etc.,

 70% of the respondents were agreed that the SNS is useful for online learning.

IV. CONCLUSION Finally the researcher concluded that college students were likely to be affected by social media. Social media is attractive; it not only provides college students another world to form friends, also provides an honest thanks to release pressure. To some degree, 60% of the respondents accepted that social media absolutely affects the lives of college students. The research results imply that too much use of social networking sites has adverse effect on college students. So today’s students have to balance the relationship between social media and academic study. Therefore, college students should think more about the balancing equation of social media and academics.

REFERENCES 1 Jackson, Ervin, Gardner, & Schmitt Comparison of performance and attitude in traditional and computer conferencing classes. The American Journal of Distance Education, 5 (3), 51-64, 2004. 2 Goodman. J. 2007. “Click First, Ask Questions Later: Understanding Teen Online Behaviour”. Aplis, 20(2), 84-86.

3 Coyle, Cheryl L. and Vaughn, Heather. 2008. “Social Networking: Communication Revolution or Evolution?.Bell Labs Technical Journal, 13, 13-18.

4 Lack,Caleb W. Beck, Lisa and Hoover, Danielle. 2009. “Use of Social Networking by Undergraduate Psychology Majors”.First Monday, 14, 12.

5 Petter, BaeBrandtzaeg and Jan, Heim. 2009. “Why People Use Social Networking Sites”. Springer.Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

6 Bicen, Huseyin and Cavus, Nadire. 2010 “The Most Preferred Social Network Sites by Students” Procedia Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2, 5864-5869.

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 392 Science, Technology and Development ISSN : 0950-0707

7 Wang,Q.,Chen,w.,&liang,y (2011).the effect of social media on college students. MBA Students media,8,53-72.

8 Keol, Lim and Ellen, B. Meier. (2012). “International Student’s Use of Social Network Services in the New Culture: A Case Study with Korean Youths in the United States”. Asia Pacific Educ. Review.

9 Heffner,tara,”the effects of social media use in undergraduate students”(2016).theses and dissertations,1440.https:/rdw.rowan.edu/etd/1440.

10 Using Social Networking Sites and its Impact on College Students Kaushik Bhakta Research Scholar, Department of Education, University of Calcutta Email - [email protected]

11 The Use of Social Networking Sites among the Undergraduate Students of University of Nigeria,Nsukka Helen N. Eke Miss University of Nigeria,Nsukka, [email protected] Charles Obiora Omekwu Prof University of Nigeria, Nsukka, [email protected] Jennifer Nneka Odoh Miss University of Nigeria, Nsukka, [email protected]

12 The Impact of Social Networking Sites on College Students' Consumption Patterns Whitney Sue [email protected]

13 The Impact of Social Networking Sites on the Youth Khurana N*Amity University, Noida- 201301, UP, India.

14 Effect of social networking site on students’ academic performance in sims, mangalore:an investigative study. Krishna Prasad karani srinivas group of college.

15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

16 https://scholar.google.co.in/scholar

Volume IX Issue IV APRIL 2020 Page No : 393