NEW MEDIA AND THE SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR OF YOUTHS

ABSTRACT The study was carried out to find out how new media usage particularly social media handles affect the social behaviour of students and whether such influence is significant enough to justify the importance of investigating social media impact. The work was guided by three objectives as well as three research questions. Furthermore, some literatures were reviewed and discussed. The history of social media and other related concepts were exhaustively discussed. While a number of studies were also reviewed. The theoretical framework was based on the uses and gratification theory as well as the technological determinism theory. More so, the survey method was used to elicit information which was used for adequate generalization. The population size of 120 was maintained as it is a manageable population size. Analysis and presentation of data was done using tables, frequencies and percentages. The researcher came up with the major finding that Social media have the potential to affect social behaviour positively and negatively, and that users are often times susceptible to the negative aspect of it especially when users (students) come in contact with a deviant. Based on the findings arising from the study, the study recommended among other things that the youths need to be trained on better usage of the social media so as to minimize time wastage on chatting and other irrelevant engagements that are not of major importance on their lives. Also, the stakeholders and especially Communication Commission and network providers' needs to come up with means of filtering information that reaches the young people through social media platforms. This will help minimize exposing them to pornographic and other unwarranted materials.