Background to the Study
Technology in communication no doubt has turned the entire world into a “Global Village”, but as it is, technology has its own positive and negative sides. Technology exposes humans to a better way of doing things. It helps people to be better informed, enlightened and keeping abreast with world developments. Social media has exploded as a category of online discourse where people create content, share it, bookmark it and network at an economic rate. Social media is defined as “technologies that made social communication easy and enable discussions among its participants”. Social media could also mean a web-based mobile application that allows people or companies to make, interact with, and share new user-generated or current material, in digital environment. In the last ten years, the online world has changed dramatically, thanks to the invention of social media, young men and women now exchange ideas, feelings, personal information, pictures and videos at a truly astonishing rate. Students are consumers and producers of media. Thanks to the Internet and social web including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, smartphone and text messaging, most students increasingly live in a world where information is access to communication technologies. Social networking websites provides tools by which people can communicate, share information, and create new relationships. With the popularity of social networking websites on the rise, our social interaction is affected in multiple ways as we adapt to our increasingly technological world. The way web users interact and talk to each other has changed and continues to change. These users now socialize through the Internet and it takes way from the person socialization that has been around forever. Social networking websites have affected our social interaction by changing the way we interact face-to-face, how we receive information, and the dynamics of our social groups and friendships (Asur and Huberman, 2010).