The Increase of The Social Media and The Technological Communication

During the past 20 years, social media and the technological communication increased steeply. Nowadays everyone has access to the Internet and can communicate, through an application, with another person which is on the other side of the world. Thanks to these social media every person became a social animal who just communicates in a virtual way. People, in the past, started to learn with books, exercise books, and articles, and so they were used to find paper-based information. Nowadays, everyone is addicted to finding information and doing researches in a fast way, by using the internet and by browsing through different websites.

So, social media helps people a lot, by finding on a website the most relevant and current article he/she can get. The majority of the people cannot leave home and go to work without bringing the mobile phone with them, it is always needed and as soon as possible a person is trying to call or to write a message, in this case, it has to be answered as fast as possible, because if not, the person on the other side will think that he will be ignored and it will show a non respectful behaviour. For the job environment, social media is one of the most important features that employees and employers can work with; these bring between different personnel a direct connection through companies or departments which can be very far away from each other. This connection between individuals brings also to a specific mood, which is happiness, and this brings also a better productivity which consequently might bring a good revenue for a certain company.

Every social media, like Facebook or Instagram, are helping people to create work groups which are helpful for connecting and developing employees. An important factor of social media, in the working environment, is transparency, where nobody can mask something and where data is seen at the light of the sun, in order to have more honor in front of the leadership and more comprehension of the company goals. Apart from the work, while studying, social media is the most used tool, in order to find information, to get connected via emails, video calls and chats. At a university, like IUBH or at any school, we can observe that without any laptop or smartphone, people would be lost, in the terms that nobody would know how to study. Like we observe daily, today's university study material is made more out of digital platforms were slides are being downloaded and are ready to be studied from the students; books and academic journals are still seen in libraries but are not so often used as other digital tools. While studying with just a digital tool (laptop, smartphones, tablets), it does not give the student a detailed information or does not inform him about a detailed research; instead, a book can give detailed facts and gives information as a whole, which is described much more precisely.

Social media, as many people say, do not let the student always concentrate while there is a certain percentage of distraction. Sometimes happens that students, while studying on a laptop, do not remain concentrated on the task at hand, thus this gives the student a chance to be distracted while going on e.g. YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook. Other tools which distract students, while studying on laptops, are the notifications and alerts which are coming from the different social websites. Because of these distractions, students will bring less time outdoors practicing sports, playing outside or reading books and much more time in front of electronic devices. Combined with the huge amount of time people spend in front of social media, according to different surveys, they spend per day also more than 2 hours drinking and eating. This is, of course, not a completely healthy way to live the daily life. In overall, social media is changing and evolving continuously, in the working and educational field, and if we agree with it or not, it has a dominant impact on it. On our survey, we conducted a descriptive style research. Our aim of this research objective was to find out the correlation between how social media influences the overall study behavior of students at IUBH. We conducted our research using a method of a questionnaire followed by an observation for several practical reasons.

Questionnaires are the most cost-effective way to gather quantitative data; secondly, they are extremely proficient at selecting the target audience required. There can be some major drawbacks to the use of questionnaires. People who respond to your survey may not give you one hundred percent truthful answers, some other biases to questionnaire might be the ability to analyze the data correctly, it may become too difficult to derive the relevant information due to a lack of transparency. Our observation was conducted daily, within the social environment. As observed in the classroom, where social media is taking the center stage of the students daily and social life, we have also seen, through being enrolled at the university for a length of time, that social media not only in the classroom is taking control of students, but even in a more social atmosphere like Charlies, in the Mensa, in the SCR room, in the project room or in the Dallmayr Café. People, when being observed in a social context, their scope of use may vary from one point to another including the way they use social media, at one view it may look like the student is using it to research on google, or on the contrary to looking up irrelevant information on Instagram or Snapchat. Besides the fact, it is not precisely known how students invest their time using such social media applications in and out of the classroom. The research we conducted, was only limited to the student population of the ‘’International University of Applied Sciences Bad Honnef’’. Our tool of information we used was conducted specifically narrowing down to the Facebook group ‘’IUBH Bad Honnef’’.

Until now, we used the questionnaire to gather our necessary data needed to conclude our findings. Our questionnaire was posted from December 3, 2017, till January 3, 2018. We gained in total 51 responses. Our response rate was low due to a few known variables. Because of having received the responses during the winter semester, due to the bad weather, the cold climate and the holiday season (including the Christmas period), few people were not concentrated on Facebook, or by being more precise, they were not looking at the IUBH Facebook page where the survey was published all together. In addition, some people might have answered quickly without reading carefully the questions, due to time lacking and considerations between the Christmas Break. At the end of our conclusions, we found the relevant information needed in order to find a correlation between the different variables. The conclusion to our findings regarding our questionnaire was self-completed using the Internet as a source of information. The tool we used is the survey platform for “Survey Monkey. In the questionnaire, we gained three different variables which are opinion, behavior, and attribute. The questionnaire consists of 10 multiple choice questions where the respondents could use a multiple response style question. Per the question, there are from 2 to 10 choices, wherein a question there is no limited number of boxes where the respondent can tick. It was posted on Facebook through the “IUBH group”. As displayed in our first question, “what is the age group?” the percentage of people with the majority ranges between the age of 18-21 with the responses of 43.14 %, this is because it represents the age with the most subscribers at the university.

On the second place, the age between 22 and 25 answered with a 41.18 %, having this high percentage is normal because at the ‘’IUBH University’’ there are a lot of students who attend different master courses. Regarding the age below 18, just one student answered. Mentioning the question number 3, the males who answered are 25 out of 51, while the females are 26 out of 51. Nearly the double of the respondents are not German, who reached 62.75 %, this explains the internationality of the university. The majority of undergraduate students replied to the survey with an 84.31 % of answers, the responses regarding the postgraduate students is 13.73%, while the preparatory course students only arrive at 1.96%. The vast majority of undergraduate students responses is because of their larger time slots that they have during their studies, here we are able to observe how busy postgraduate students, during their semester, are. This explains the reason where master students do not have so much time and are not willing to answer so many surveys as in the past. In the 5th question ‘’which semester are you from?’’, the answer percentage was pretty distributed between a different number of semesters, but the highest percentage was the 2nd semester with 13 answers, the second highest was the 1st-semester students while all the other semesters have a lower answer rate. This higher answer rate between the 1st and the 2nd-semester students, explains again their curiosity of answering a certain survey and also because they are in their initial part of the university programme, which is not so challenging in confront to higher semester programmes.

The semester students who answered less are those who are in the 4th and the 7th, this is due to their internship in Germany or abroad. Question number 6 asks ‘’what kind of social media do students use?’’. As many people know nowadays, is that Whatsapp and Facebook are the most used social media between young people; the result of the survey gives to these two social platforms the highest answer rate, which is 98% for Whatsapp and 96% for Facebook. This percentage was already foregone, e.g. Whatsapp is used a lot for studying because people can send unlimited document files, messages, photos, audio messages and video messages. All these methods which ‘’Whatsapp’’ gives helps students a lot by studying in a much faster way.

On the third place is ‘’Youtube’’ which helps students learning through video lessons and lets students pass their time. ‘’Twitter’’, ‘’Viber’’ and ‘’Tinder’’ are those with the lowest percentage, instead, the answer regarding the Emails reached 70% due to the importance of sending larger documents between students. Analysing the question number 7, which asks ‘’What electronic device use students to access social media?’’, we arrived at a conclusion where the smartphone is the most used electronic device between students at IUBH. On a certain side, smartphones are an easy distraction especially during a class or a meeting but at the same time are used for contacting a person as soon as possible and even for exchanging fast messages. The laptop is the 2nd most used electronic device to access social media among students, in order to conduct research, turn in documents and use different software. The tablet, which is smaller but very practical in order to study on the train, on the bus or in a park, is used by 17 people out of 51.

Smartwatches instead, are not really likely used to access social media because of their smallness, but are useful for quick information, short messages or calls due to their connection with a smartphone; smartwatches are still used from the 19.61% of the respondents of the survey. Regarding the question number 8, which wants to know ‘’How many hours per week do students spent their time on social media?’’, shows that 29.41% of the students spend this time between 6 and 8 hours per week. This number nowadays is even not so high as it has to be; moreover, we can observe, around the university campus, that students spend a lot more time on social media. 21.57% of the students use social media 12 or more hours a week; if we would confront our observation with this result that we gained, this seems more truthful. Question number 9 wants to know ‘’why are people using social media?’’ The highest answer rate is 94.12% with the answer ‘’get in touch with family and friends’’. From this answer we can observe how students at university, living far away from their family, are often getting in touch with their family through social media; thanks to different observations, we found out that to be connected with friends and family, students use ’’Whatsapp video calls’’, ’’Skype’’, ’’Messenger’’ and ’’Facetime’’.

Another high answer rate was given through the answer ‘’Get new information’’ within total 88%. 29% answered to ‘’share music and conduct research’’, while ‘’play games’’ has the lower answer rate. At last, but not least, the last questions ask about a rating on the advantages and disadvantages of social media in education, where the respondents, between every statement, had to rate between low, medium or high. The most weighted average between the statement ‘’it encourages creativity’’ was 2.04, the least weighted average is with 1.29. Almost everyone agrees that social media gets everyone more connected. On the negative side, as it was already explained in the introduction, there is a high rate of the possibility of distraction and compromises privacy. This is a very truthful answer, many people see that privacy is a serious problem, e.g. students can easily enter a students university platform from another person or enter a someone else Facebook page. The ’’high’’ rate on ‘’student can get instant feedback’’ arrives at 52.94% while the 11.76% disagrees. Due to self-experience, instant feedback is very known and also really important to know how companies and organizations can improve; this grants a support to the company in order to provide a better service for future customers.

The rate in the statement ‘’it promotes poor writing’’ is well balanced; while always studying in front of an electronic device by typing texts, it is very easy to forget how to write by hand and students would not be used anymore to write on a piece of paper. In overall, the responses were not always truthful or precise, this is because not every student took that survey seriously, but in the end, the questionnaire was quite successful. As a result, social media has its negative and positive sides. As technology continues to evolve around us, social media will always be a tool where people will use continuously. Using our questionnaire and our observations we averagely found out how students at IUBH use social media daily, with what kind of electronic devices they study and how many hours they spend on them. Social media changed completely our life, we just have to use them in an appropriate way without using them meaningfully. This research gave the opportunity to understand the today’s study behavior of students and to compare it to the study methodology in the past, this helps to explain the huge evolution that technology and the social media did. In the end, the aim of social media is to connect people worldwide in a fast way, being used as a marketing tool and as a channel for customer service.

Students, from now onwards will continue to use social media more and more, but they should also not forget the former study methodology.