CHAPTER II

Review of Related Literature and Studies

This chapter discusses the related literatures and studies to further understand

the variables and statement of the problem of the study.

Review of Related Literature

The title of thesis Social Media: Its Roles and Usage among Grade 12

Accountancy, Business and Management Students. The Study can be measured in

terms of frequency of social media engagement and different roles it portray to students.

Social Media

Nowadays, social media is becoming the popular means to interact with people

even from across borders of the country. As Daluba and Maxwell (2013) put it, “The

traditional way of meeting each other is long gone and now the world meets at social

media websites”. In addition, Techtarget (n.d.) mentioned that social media is the

collective of online communication channel dedicated to community-based input,

interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Moreover, the key thing for social media

is “interacting”- a site where the commenting and interaction was the key purpose and

design of the website would probably be more so (i.e. a blog). Social media phrase that

we throw around a lot these days, often to describe on what we post on sites or apps

such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others (Nations, 2017). Social
media has greatly changed the way people act in the society because everything has

become easy with the presence of social media.

Information Provider

Social media is used for collecting information, as well as disseminating

information. Social media brings information to people by what is seen in the videos or

news posted online by social media users. Through this, people gain information. In

relation to social media as an information provider, according to Lougnborough

University, information providers are often referred to as a form of short hand. It could

be through news or in a piece of information and etc. This means that social media has

been used for gathering news and recent updates.

Because of social media, news has been wide coverage because not only

reporters could provide news to everyone, but also people in the society participate in

disseminating information through social media as a result of collecting information from

what was witnessed or experienced. This embarks an opportunity for the news or an

update to be publicly broadcasted either online, with detailed information from

participating users, or through television and radios, which are locally broadcasted.

Social media are gaining prominence as an information source in disaster and

risk. As what Sutton, Palen, and Shklovski (2008) suggest, social media helped in

disseminating information on the Haiti disaster in 2010. Social media was used to

spread information about the disaster, ask for assistance and provide awareness to its

neighboring countries.
 Social media is not only used for gathering information but also, in disseminating

information. When social media users see posts online, they try to verify if the

information is certified true and reliable or just fake news (Spence P., Van der Heide B.,

Westerman, D., 2013). Social media as an information provider brought about credibility

and accuracy issues since there are so many websites that provide different comments,

reviews and opinions regarding different matter (Spence P., Van der Heide B.,

Westerman, D., 2013). Social media users distinguish fake news from real ones by

checking the accuracy of information and the credibility of the one who posted

information. Information dissemination follows after the data is checked and proven to

be true.

Socialization and Communication

Social media is a social platform. It is created to connect the world into one big

platform through internet. Social media, particularly social networking sites serves as

communication tool. Social media is useful in meeting new people, collaboration and

bridging communication gap. Social media bridges the distance among different people.

It offers platforms for online users to find others who share the same interests and build

virtual communities based on those shared interests. With the availability of social

media technologies and services, content sharing and user interaction has become

relatively easy and efficient (Baruah T.D., 2012). Social networking sites render the

opportunity for people to reconnect with their old friends, colleagues and classmates

(Siddiqui, S.&Singh, T.,2016).

Reviews and Opinions

Social media is also used for communication, collaboration, reviews and

opinions, brand monitoring, and etc. (Fernando, 2012). By means of collaboration, in

obtaining data, there is usage of varied sources from social media to spread societal,

environmental and political news. This means that people do not only use one source

as basis for spreading information, but also using different sources to check the

verifiability and credibility of such information. Social media includes, also, online

reviews and opinions regarding different problems present in our society whether locally

or internationally. Through this, it can create awareness and public information for every

individual in a society and critically think about the societal issues and concerns whether

there is government involvement or local mass involvement.

Moreover, Sapienza (2016) mentioned that posting opinions on social media

reaches a wider audience than one could believe. She further explained that once

people are interested in hearing about a story, it is so easy to type in keywords in the

search bar with posts relating to that story. She emphasized the importance for people

to voice out their opinions on social media because their posts could reach people

whom they do not know. Moreover, she elaborated that with Facebook having a share

button and Twitter having a retweet button, posts could easily reach people of different

languages and backgrounds in the blink of an eye. She highlighted the importance and

role of social media because through voicing out opinions, there is a probability that one

may be able to sway a neutral reader’s opinion on the issue and give them insight on

why they believe that kind of idea. She emphasized the importance of having social

media as a platform to share one’s experiences, knowledge, and idea with other people.
Social Media in different contexts

Social media usage varies from one person to another. For individuals, social

media is used to keep in touch with friends and extended family, network for career

opportunities, find people from all over the globe who share a common interest, share

content and more (investopedia, 2017). The way people use social media has its pros

and cons.

The use of social media in education plays a variety of roles as highlighted by Al-

Khalifa and Garcia (2013), which include providing a media to share ideas as well as

allowing students to build their own communities to collaborate with each other,

facilitating the art of learning and reaching out to the students in order to understand

and teach them at the same time. However, it has also been reported that social media

as means for collaboration with peers loses its original purpose. Instead of collaborating

online about academic works, they end up using social media for unrelated matter such

as playing games, watching movies, and chatting about unrelated things to academic

works (Kavitha, 2016).

In a business context, social media helped boost sales performance of

companies. Social media assisted in understanding their audience or target market by

their likes and dislikes. In addition, it also helps the business for promotional activities.

Social networking sites help to make new customers by providing useful facilities. It also

helps to increase awareness among brands and reach with little to no budget (Siddiqui,

S.&Singh, T.,2016). Moreover, social media's role in helping businesses is significant. It

facilitates communication with customers, enabling the melding of social interactions on

e-commerce sites. Its ability to collect information helps focus marketing efforts and
market research. It helps in promoting products and services, as it enables the

distribution of focused, timely and exclusive sales and coupons to would-be customers.

Lastly, it can assist in relationship building, such as through loyalty programs linked to

social media (Investopedia, 2017).

However, Siddiqui, S.& Singh, T (2016) reported that there are downsides in

using social media as a business tool. He mentioned that the negative comment or

feedbacks about a specific product or service posted in social media can lead the

organization to failure. Moreover, many of the large organizations have fallen victim to

the hackers. In addition, the wrong online brand strategy can doom a company, and put

at a huge viral social disadvantage (Siddiqui, S.&Singh, T.,2016).

In a societal context, social media helps to meet people they may not have met

outside the social media forums. It also helps to share ideas beyond the geographical

boundaries. It provides open opportunity for all writers and bloggers to connect with

their clients. Moreover, social networking sites unite people on a huge platform for the

achievement of specific goals. This brings positive change in the society. Social media

provides awareness among society like campaigns, advertisement articles, promotions

which helps the society to be up to date with the current information (Siddiqui,

S.&Singh, T.,2016).

However, engaging in social media people addicted. People spend most of their

time in social networking sites that can divert the concentration and focus from the

particular task. Social media can easily influence the kids. It is because of social media

contents such as photos, videos on media that contain violence and other negativities

that affect the behavior and health of kids or teenagers. It also abuses the society by
invading on people’s privacy. Social ties like family ones also weaken as people spend

more time connecting to new people. Aside from this, it’s not clear that who the

“strangers” are especially in the field of social media, creating an identity exploitation

(Siddiqui, S.&Singh, T.,2016).

Social Media Platforms

Social media, alone, has a wide coverage. It can be in the form of social

networking sites (SNS), bookmarking sites, micro-blogging sites, media sharing sites,

social news sites, and blogs and forums (Saha, 2012).

Saha (2012) defined social networking sites (SNS) as services in which users set

up a profile in order to establish a connection with friends or other users, who have

similar backgrounds or interests. The profile contains a users’ personal information. A

social networking site would allow a user to create profiles or personal homepages

online and build up a social network. The profile page created is like the user‘s

personalized webpage and contains profile information of the user like gender, religion,

orientation, interests, place of birth, current location, marital status, books liked etc. The

page can be customized as the user wants and include video clips, music files or photos

on their page. Also included on the page is a list of friends that form the user‘s network.

Typically, these friends are actual friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, who may

have sent a friend request and the user has included them in his or her list

Baruah,T.D.(2012). Social networking sites provide various ways for users to interact
with one another (Saha, 2012). Examples of social networking sites include Facebook

and LinkedIn.

Moreover, he defined other forms of social media such as bookmarking sites,

micro-blogging sites, and media sharing sites, societal news sites, and blogs and

forums. Bookmarking sites are services which allow users to save search and organize

links to various internet resources and websites. Some services will allow the tagging of

links in order for them to be shared easily as well as being searched for. Examples of

bookmarking sites include del.icio.

On the other hand, micro blogging sites are services that can be associated with

social networking sites and blogging; however, the messages exchanged are limited in

terms of size. Users have to subscribe to the services. Examples of micro blogging sites

include Twitter.

In addition, Saha (2012) defined media sharing sites as services that allow users

to upload and share media such as videos and photos as well as allowing users to

comment and tag media. Examples of media sharing services include YouTube and

Flickr.

He further defined social news sites as services that allows other users to vote

on news articles and links to external articles, which are posted by users. The news

articles that get the most votes are displayed more prominently on the site. Examples of

social news sites include Digg and Reddit.

Lastly, Saha (2012) introduced the last form of social media which are Blogs and

forums. He emphasized that blogs are like online diaries of thoughts, which give other
users the opportunity to post comments on the blog postings while forums allow

registered users to have conversations with other users by post messages. Examples of

blogging sites include Wordpress.

Despite of all the presented forms of social media, the researchers have

identified websites, instead, rather than using categorical way of defining social media.

In this research, social media are referred to as the top 10 most widely used social

media sites emphasized by Karadkar (2015) which are as follows: Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google +, Tumblr, Flickr, and Reddit.

The aforementioned social media sites have great impact on its users. Different

social media sites serve different purpose, just like how students perceive the contents

differently in these social media sites. In this latter, social media sites mentioned could

either help spread and bring information useful serving its role as an information

provider, or for entertainment purposes making a huge impact on the lives of students.

Review of Related Studies

Social media has different usages for people. It can help them gather

information, bring entertainment, publishing reviews and opinions about different

societal information, and the best way of communicating to people. There are different

studies conducted showing the impact of social media in their lives and how it affected

them in different aspects.

As an information provider, particularly in the educational aspect, social media

influenced the academic performance of students. According to Kavitha (2016), the

positive impact that social media brings to students, particularly social networking sites,

are the following: (a) social media is an effective communication application, thus it will

be useful to employ in higher education, (b) social media can set up group discussions

that will benefit students academically, (c) through social media, students can receive

the announcements from lecturers and faculty, (d) it can help students discuss

assignments and other school works through social media, and (e) social media

improves the interaction between classmates, lecturers and other subject experts.

As for news information, Mitchell (2015) revealed in her study entitled, Social

Media’s Influence on Public Discourse on Pacific Northwest, that the majority of 18-34

years old (55%) and nearly half of women (49%) agreed that social media is how they

get news. Education is also a dominant factor in whether they view social media as a

news resource; 50% of those polled with a high school diploma or less said social

networks are their primary news resource compared to 36% of those with a college

degree or more. This indicates that most of the people also use social media as source

for information and and serves as their best means to share news information to people.

As for political information, social media serves as the means to gather political

information and updates. Kahne, J. (2018) mentioned in his study that online activity is

also transforming young people’s engagement with politics. In addition, he mentioned

that the Internet has become a dominant force when it comes to how campaign funds

are raised, information is accessed, perspectives are shared and discussed, and

individuals are mobilized to act politically. Moreover, Kahne (2018) discussed in his

study that, social media are now part of politics’ mainstream. They’ve changed the ways

that people access political ‘information’ (and the kind of ‘information’ that they access),
and done so in ways that weren’t initially expected (‘filter bubbles’). They’re changing

ways in which politicians seek support and votes. Social media has become an

important venue for gathering political information.

Social media, nowadays is also being used as a source of information about

societal concerns. According to Grazzini (2017), social issues are anything that is a

concern for society. It will depend on the culture, community and country. People gain

information about social issues through what is posted on social media. According to

Canonigo (2016), some of the societal problems existing in the Philippines are heavy

traffic, pollution, poor educational system, flooding, high crime rates, drugs and poverty.

In addition, Gaitho (2017) also mentioned that role of social media as a source of

societal information. It brings an increased awareness about societal issues,

although there are question whether this awareness is translating into real

change. Moreover, she explained that social sharing has encouraged people to

use computers and mobile phones to express their concerns on social is sues

without actually having to engage actively with campaigns in real life. Their

support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content .

In the study conducted by Rithika, M. & amp; Sara Selvaraj (2013), it revealed

that most of the students use social media for entertainment and not for educational

purposes. It could be hypothesized based in this study that social media has been used

more by students for other purposes such as downloading and watching videos and

streaming music, which is contradicting the idea of its main purpose for educational use.

Moreover, Brown (2013), mentioned in his study that many of the people now use social

media not just for sharing of information and a platform for communication, but they
have found a great advantage from it for entertainment purposes, specifically for content

sharing and streaming of videos, and playing games as one of the most prevalent social

media activities by students. Moreover, Saha (2012) mentioned that the evolution of

technology has influenced the way people find entertainment, such as accessing media

through their mobile devices. In addition, he emphasized that digital distribution of the

content over the web and mobile is going to be the future trend, which is actually the

existing phenomenon nowadays. He further emphasized that today’s audience has the

freedom to choose from multiple ranges of contents and also the when and where they

will watch the content.

Aside from educational aspect, social media also plays a major role in publishing

reviews and opinions. Mitchell (2015) mentioned in her study entitled, Social Media’s

Influence on Public Discourse on Pacific Northwest, of those users who have posted or

shared content on a political topic, 40% said other people’s posts had helped change

their own views. Only 24% of those who had not shared political content agreed that

others’ posts had influenced them personally. In fact, 67% of those non-sharers said

that social media has never changed their opinion on a political issue. She emphasized

that one may easily conclude that a user’s general attitude towards sharing content is a

key indicator of their willingness to read and consider other people’s perspectives. This

means that people’s comments and feedback may affect the perspective of a person

ang may change someone’s views over a particular idea or topic. Moreover, Mitchell

(2015) also mentioned that the amount of time users spend on social media has some

causal connection to a willingness to change their views based on what others share or

post.
 Social media remains social as Mitchell (2015) emphasized. She suggested that

for many users, the truest value of social media remains a social one. There is a reason

it is called “social media.” Most of the public uses these tools for personal reasons. It’s a

way to stay in touch with friends. It’s a way to share personal news and milestones.

That’s what makes social media.

In addition, Tyson (2013) revealed in his study entitled, Connecting through

Facebook: The Influence of Social Networking on Communication, that the respondents

preferred social networking sites to communicate with friends instead of gaming, picture

uploading or other activities. They use social media as means to communicate with their

peers, not compromising the role of social media as communication tool. The root

purpose of all of this connectivity in this medium is a positive one. Tyson (2013) asserts

that social media is used it to deliver messages, convey people’s thoughts and feelings,

and gather information about each other. Furthermore, he emphasized that the

important aspect of social media is that it is used to communicate in a way that forms

such as the already established cell phones, instant messaging and e-mail.

In another study conducted by Moqbel (2013), it was found out that most of the

people engage in social networking sites to develop new relationships, in addition to

maintaining old ones. Moreover, he emphasized in his study that social media bridges

the distance among different people. It offers platforms for online users to find others

who share the same interests and build virtual communities based on those shared

interests.
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