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CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

2.1 Respondents’ Profile

2.1.1 Age

Age is closely related to social network size and composition in real life,

suggesting its relevance to online social networking. Classic theories of aging predict that

2 older age is related to decreased social network size due to physical health changes,

retirement, bereavement or voluntary emotional selectivity (Cumming et al., 2018;

Lemon et al., 2020; Carstensen et al., 2022). More recently, some studies indicate that

age has a U-shape relationship with the volume of social activities (Cornwell et al.,

2017).

According to Lenhart et al., (2010), about 57% of social network users are 18-29

years old and have a personal profile on multiple social media websites. In a study by

Pempek, Yermolayeva, and Calvert (2009), the amount of time spent daily on social

network sites varied greatly.

2.1.2 Gender
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Social networks sites have become the most popular instrument used to

communicate and exchange information resulting in the addiction to this media. Previous

studies suggested that personal characters play an essential role in addictive behavior and

gender difference may be involved. Nevertheless, there are contradictions about the

influence of gender.

Gender has been found to occupy a special place in understanding people's

decisions in the adoption and use of new technologies (Volkovich et al., 2017).

Bujala (2016) suggest that men are likely to have more time for the use of social

network because of gender expectations and roles. In other words, the societal

expectations and norms tend to favour men than women who are expected to take care of

the private sphere while men take care of the public sphere which the social network

incorporates. Volkovich et al. (2016) aver that societal expectations tend to favour men.

However, they argued that there are more women in the use of social media than men. In

other words, Volkovich et al. (2016) suggest that women outnumbered men for most

social networking sites with the exception of LinkedIn.

Brook Duffy, associate professor at Cornell University, mentioned that “the social

media age is often touted as a meritocracy, wherein the ‘best’ content gets rewarded with

quantifiable indexes of status: likes, follows, and favorites. But the reality is, women’s

voices—be it in the realms of politics, sports, journalism, or academia—fail to register

the same level of attention” (Smith, 2019). The way that perceptions and beliefs are
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disseminated through social media affects our way of thinking! Likewise, the tangible

world, in the digital one social inequality exists and, sometimes, it is aggravated by

gender bias.

Various factors, such as gender representation in media, play a role in gender

discrimination. Media nurture gender roles and behavioral traits through advertisements

and photos where women’s roles vary from childcare to workplace activities displaying

women dependence while, on the other hand, men are portrayed as more independent and

less likely to express their emotions. So, although the digital world gives us the

opportunity to express ourselves through our e-identity, in reality, digital settings simply

lead us to the replication of the existing norms and culture of the tangible world, related

to gender (Rose, et. al., 2015).

2.1.3 Parents’ occupation

Parents have informal jobs who are mainly self-employed with job without a

guarantee to turn over cannot afford to spend a great deal of time on their children

(Usaini,2015). Highly educated parents with high or low occupation level had better

outcomes compared to their peers whose parents had low educational and occupation

level (Chillon et al..,2011).

This study confirms parent’s effect on their children’s glycemic control. It found

positive connection between educational and occupation levels of father and mother

(Abdelfattah et al..,2017).
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Family socio-economic status of parent’s state the father’s education, occupation

and income affects children’s performance (Das and Sinha, 2017)

Parents’ occupation identify the parent’s ability to finance the academic performance also

(Gabriel et al..,2016).

Parents of different occupation classes often have different style of child rearing,

different ways of disciplining their children and different of reacting to their children.

These differences do not express themselves consistently as expected in the case of every

family, rather they influence the average tendencies of families for different occupation

classes (Breen, 2014).

2.2 Number of hours spent in social media

In finding answers to number of hours students spend on social media activities;

the study further revealed that on daily basis, 14.4% respondents spend 6 hours online.

25(18%) respondents spend 4 hours online and 52(37.4%) respondents spend 2 hours and

27.3% respondents spend 1 hour online and 2.9% respondents spend 30 to 40 minutes

daily on social media. Time is a very important factor in examining the effect of social

media generally. Findings from the analyzed data revealed that most of the respondents

consume not less than 2 to 4 hours daily. The result here correlates with the work of

Lawal and Oluwatoyin (2011) where they pointed that social media users spend an

average of two to six hours using social media while non-users spend between eight and
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seventeen hours studying. According to him those who spend hours using social media

devotes lesser time to academic venture.

2.3 Most visit social platforms

2.3.1 Facebook

Facebook has become the most popular social networking site among college

students and worldwide. Facebook is used in multilingual languages. 70 languages

(Kamnoetsin,2014) around the world. According to Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO of

Facebook’s number of active users Facebook, hit one billion as of September, 2012, with

a larger number of active users than any other social networking sites (Davies, 2012).

Facebook being social networking sites provides an online platform on which

students create profiles, promote and share information and contents and have

interactions with contacts both known and unknown (Kirkpatrick, 2010). Facebook have

expanded recently, which have led to its use by people of all generations extentsively.

Several types of research examine this online platform attraction and its persuasive

character and the reason that cause people of every kind and different ages to this

communicate. Other studies show that facebook extention presence can have effects that

are harmful to academic performance. If students spend most of their for time on

facebook, their academic performance will reduce and thus their grades (Kirkpatrick,

2010). A day sudents should spend at least 30-35 minutes surfing facebook. They
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actually surf for only three to four minutes on each visit to be updated, but they severally

visit facebook a day. Others spend eight on the website.

2.3.2 Instagram

A photo sharing app that allows user to edit photos and upload them to share with

their followers. Uses can choose to have a private or a public account. They can also

share a photo directly with a selected few people. This is the equivalent of a private

message.

According to Telegraph (2015), the top ten most popular Instagram accounts are

all celebrities who all have around 30 million followers. By partnering with one of these

celebrities, you are already reaching an engaged and targeted audience of 30 million

people. This social media plan is cost-effective and can be very influential. In December

2013, Speedo launched “Art of the Cap”, where the company enlisted Olympic athletes

and artists in a charitable social media campaign (Birkner, 2016) The Olympic gold

medalists were paired with an artist where they collaborated to design a swim cap that

will be sold to benefit charities that Instagram is one of many social media applications

that the Internet population is using on a daily basis. It is a simple photo-taking and

photo-sharing application that was released on October 6, 2017 created by Kevin Systrom

and Mike Krieger.

2.3.3 Tiktok
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TikTok is very active, with a lot of activities online and offline, targeting young

people with imagination and curiosity. And it has created a music community with

distinctive and individual trends. The music category is divided into content categories.

The special effects are very cool and cater to the trend. In the era of knowledge payment,

the” Tik Tok” and the major music platforms cooperate to have many music. Since 2107,

the short video industry has been on the rise. The “Tik Tok” app is a music creative short

video social software that went live in September 2016. In 2017, it became a dark horse

from many short video apps.

According to A.M. Ostrovsky and J.R. Chen (2020) One of the most recent

platforms to surge to prominence hasbeen TikTok, a social network with more than 45.6

million active users in the U.S.—with 63.5% being aged <29years- where creators post

videos of themselves talking, dancing, or lip-syncing. With its unique “For You”

page,where the majority of viewed content is randomly selected rather than drawn from a

pool of “friends,” TikTokgenerates a wider and more diverse audience than the

traditional “follower”-based social media model. Videos aresorted into hashtags, with

search results directly sorted by likes received per post.

2.3.4 Twitter

Twitter to share information related to day to-day governance, political figures,

parties and the works of the regime in power (Boyd et al. 2010; Jason and Kevin 2014;

Pang and Ng 2016; Weller et al. 2014). Twitter make it one of the most appropriate

virtual environments for information monitoring and tracking. In this paper, the authors
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review different information analysis techniques; starting with the analysis of different

hashtags, twitter's network-‐topology, event spread over the network, identification of

influence, and finally analysis of sentiment. Future research and development work will

be addressed.

2.3.5 YouTube

YouTube is a popular video sharing (video sharing) website where users can load,

watch and share video clips for free. Mostly, videos on YouTube are music clips, movies,

TV, and videos made by the users themselves. The format used by videos on YouTube is

fly which can be played on web browsers that have the Flash Player plugin. According to

Bonk (2016, p. 7) YouTube had a market share of 43 percent. If students are determined

to focus on certain clips that are not available on YouTube due to copyright infringement

laws, then students will have to procure these clips on their own. given the vastness of the

YouTube library, a certain amount of structuring and guidance from the teacher might be

necessary in order to prevent students from spending unproductive hours perusing the

site. The site does not allow nudity, there is a fair amount of risk content and provocative

language available. However, according to Watkins & Wilkins (2016, p. 25) YouTube

remains a valid resource for teachers seeking to enhance their lessons with lively, topical

content, and further research into the use of the site (as well as other online video-

streaming websites) would be very welcome for the EFL and SLA community.

YouTube can be a learning resource and learning media that can meet the

demands of the digital generation needs. YouTube can increase interest and support the
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digital generation learning style. YouTube also offers learning experiences with new

technologies that will be useful when they graduate (Burke, Snyder, & Rager, 2017, p. 2-

3). In addition, YouTube also provides hundreds of thousands of videos with a variety of

topics that can be integrated in 13 classroom learning. YouTube will also be a very free

video library for learners who will encourage them to become independent learners.

2.4 Effect of social media

As internet access gets easier, it is not surprising that many students use social

media daily. In English language learning, social media plays a crucial role in the four

basic skills of language (i.e. Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing), as well as

establishing English vocabulary and competency (Khan et al., 2016; Rostami & Balmaki

2018). By using social media, Yunus et al. (2012) commented that students’ thinking

becomes more creative while Linse (2006) suggested that the language of learners will be

improved overall. In fact, due to the rapid development of the world and technology, it is

said that language learning has grown beyond the boundaries of the four walls of the

classroom (Yunus & Salehi, 2012). Students can read different types of texts from social

media without having to read large numbers of books. This indirectly enables students to

engage with educational content informally, and also provides them a more flexible and

pleasant way to enhance their English learning. It is easy to see how social media has

eased English language learning. However, negative effects of social media arisen for

discussion. An interview by Shih (2011) found that students who used social media (e.g.
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Facebook) relied heavily on online auto-correction tools, resulting in less awareness

about the accuracy of their spelling skills outside of social media, when no help was

provided for their writing. On the other hand, one finding by Perkins (2013) showed that

social media such as Twitter only enables users 140 characters for each post. It indirectly

limits users in their complete sentences, resulting in the creation of acronyms and short

forms. Eventually, this leads to a poor choice of words and the tendency to use this form

of writing in their formal written tasks.

Olubiyi (2012) noted that the level at which students are so enthralled to online

chatting is one of the commonest trends in societies today, virtually 24 hours is spent on

social media by active users(mostly student) to socialize and satisfy their yearnings for

visibility in the virtual world. Even in classrooms and lecture theatres, it has been

observed that some students are always busy pinging, 2going or Facebooking, while

lectures are on, time ought be channeled towards learning, academic research and

innovative engagements have been crushed by the passion for meeting new friends

online, and most times busy discussing trivial issues and most painful of all spelling

words wrongly. Thus, countless number of students experience academic impediment by

virtue of excessive social media practice. Obi, Bulus,Adamu and Sala ( 2012), observed

that majority of students that often explore social media routinely have coined and

adopted peculiar practices of  writing and abbreviating words in formal settings and

during chatting which is gradually becoming integral to their formal writing skills. For

example, students now use 2 in place of to, D in place of the, and 4 in place of for. These
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necessitated the establishment of deterioration in the use of English and grammar by

users who are mostly students, therefore this explains in clear terms that words

abbreviation while chatting has a direct link with the class assessment of students as it

alters the conventional way of spelling words as required professionally. Ellison,

Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) notes that although social media has been recognized as an

important resource for education today, other studies however shows that undergraduates

harness social media such as Facebook for fun, to while away time, to meet existing

friends or to make new ones. Also, Kimberly, Jeong and Lee, (2009), supposed that

students spend ample stretch on participating in social media activities, with many

students apportioning blames to social platforms for consistent shrinkage and decline in

excellent academic performance. It also shows that only few students are aware of the

academic and professional networking opportunities the sites offers. 

2.5 Spelling ability

Sparks (2007) defines spelling skill as an ability to relate the knowledge of

phonological processing, and letter sound correspondences, in the sounds that map onto

letters. It is also an important skill where it would influence one’s acquisition of

language. This happens when learners do not comprehend English vocabulary, and thus

face difficulties in learning the language (Riyanti, 2018; Bakar et al., 2019). Spelling has

to be mastered to learn English, as poor spelling would lead to a low proficiency in

writing. In other words, students with poor spelling tend to apply the wrong spelling
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when writing, and would confuse correct word forms. Hence, learners need to be exposed

to the correct spelling of new vocabulary to avoid the above situation.