Twitter Usage And The Impact On Young People’s Wellbeing

Abstract

Social media can contribute to wellbeing by increasing online socialization among youth and providing them with a freedom in terms of communicating and socializing. Social media allows youth to establish friendship and support thus giving them avenues to experience many of the positive elements in life. The article aims to investigate how Twitter usage promote well-being among college students. It is based from an in-depth interview with eight undergraduate students using the PERMA well-being model namely Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. The results show that the element of the PERMA model that relates to positive emotions, engagement and relationship were described most often. The findings of this study showed that Twitter do give respondents the emotional support and companionship. Respondents do engage in self-disclosure on Twitter where individuals share personal feeling, thoughts, along with inner thoughts and emotional states. This study found that on Twitter, young people maintain weak-tie based relationships giving opportunities for users to create and maintain larger networks of relationships from which they could benefited from.

Keywords: Happiness, social media, Twitter, wellbeing

Introduction

For last decades, researchers have been studying how social media contributes to wellbeing and the pursuit of happiness. The proliferation of computer-mediated communication since the ubiquity of the Internet in 1990s means social interactions have taken beyond face-to-face, where many of the subtle cues that people use to communicate are missing when communicating online. On social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter users can broadcast and express anything with lack of restraint in comparison to communicating in-person (Diener, 2012; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It is safe to argue that youth nowadays rely on social media so much for the purpose of learning, socializing, entertainment, innovation and many more.

Social Networking sites (SNS) have dominated the means of computer-mediated communication in today’s culture. One of the influential social networking platforms is Twitter. Twitter has become an increasingly relevant tool particularly in political communication. Bouvier and Rosenbaum (2020) argue that Twitter plays important role in creating communities and giving voice to underrepresented groups through the everyday conversations people often have.

Problem Statement

Past studies showed that social media could have negative effects on people’s wellbeing. Due to unrealistic social comparisons, the use of social media was reported to deteriorate mood and leads to the decline of wellbeing (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014). Feelings of envy is perceived as the by-product of social media usage and the negative effects were further amplified with using Facebook passively (Tandoc et al., 2015).

The argument on the negative effects of social media usage, however, is still questionable because the direction of this relationship remains to be established. Youth that are anxious or depressed for example may tend to spend more time on social media in order to regulate their low mood and negative feeling (Van Der Goot et al., 2012). In addition, there are many studies that has found no links between social media use and wellbeing (Jelenchick et al., 2013; Valenzuela et al., 2009).

Increasingly, more studies have found that social media use is able to give positive effects on the users’ wellbeing. A study by Akbari and Mahdian (2011) suggested the social media effectiveness in reducing psychological problem such as depression. Naeemi et al. (2014) found that the communication provided by Facebook has a positive effect on youth psychological wellbeing. This is in line with studies that found communicative use of social media provides positive psychological wellbeing outcomes because it enables communication for those who are not in a physical, face to face connection (Ellison et al., 2011). Wu (2014) examines China’s leading social network, WeChat, and found that it positively impacts users’ wellbeing due to the strong community based connections and increased opportunity for sharing experiences with selective group of friends through visual communication.

While research on young people’s social media behaviors and wellbeing is growing, there is relatively little research on the positive elements in the usage of social media among youth, particularly in Malaysia. There are major gaps in research and evidence about their activities and communications, particularly on the benefits of social media on youth wellbeing. Such understanding of social media usage by youth is important, in order to enable policy and practice to leverage the benefits of young people’s social media practices for their wellbeing.

Research Questions

The aim of this article is to examine to what extent social media can contribute to wellbeing. Five indicators of well-being theory based on Seligman’s PERMA model (2018) will be used in this article; they are Pleasure, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. Specifically, this article will probe about the usage of Twitter on 1) how it is being used by youth purposely and 2) to what extent it can leads to wellbeing based on element of PERMA framework.

Purpose of the Study

Research Methods

Twitter is an interactive social media platform, which allows users post tweets, micro-blogging with a 280 characters’ limit. Twitter is seen as valuable online communication tool for communicating ideas, vision and thoughts globally. As a communication tool, Twitter allows exchange of ideas between people interested in similar areas of expertise as well as the opportunity to engage in critical debate. Twitter also allows people to search for the very latest topic through hashtag function and explore their interest. By using hashtags users can become a part of a community of like-minded individuals with interest in a similar social cause.

For that reasons, it is also possible that people who actively participate in Twitter to feel more connected and happier (Valkenburg et al., 2017). The engagement between Twitter and its followers probably can create a room for humans to feel connected, joy and bring satisfaction in life because they meet their interests, communicate, expressing feelings and many more (Haidt, 2006). This article presents findings of a qualitative study consisting of eight semi-structured interviews (four females and four males) with college students in the 1st to 4th year of their undergraduate degrees at the Faculty of Leadership and Management, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). Participants aged from 19 to 23 were acquired through a snowball sampling strategy and the interviews lasted from 30 minutes to one hour.

The interview session was carried out in November 2019. The interviews were conducted with the students based on Seligman’s (2018) five components of wellbeing: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. The interviews investigated into the activities of Facebook usage among respondents. The interviews began with the users discussing their general reasons for using Twitter, how they feel when using Twitter, to what extent Twitter gives them any meaning in life, how attached they are to their Twitter followers and if there is any way Twitter can help them to accomplish something in their life. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis. To ensure confidentiality, the respondents were identified as Respondent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. The data were transcribed manually and analysed based on the concept of PERMA, which underpinned this study.

Findings

Findings from the interviews indicate that the element of the PERMA wellbeing model that relates to positive emotions, engagement and relationship were the most dominant and described most often relating to Twitter usage. Positive feelings and being interested and engaged and feeling connected with something through the use of Twitter was repeatedly identified as very important in the feeling of wellbeing and happiness among respondents. Respondents do engage in self-disclosure in hope to receive emotional support, instrumental support and companionship.

Conclusion

The findings of this study showed that the element of relationship is dominant in the usage of Twitter. Twitter do give respondents the emotional support, instrumental support and companionship. For that reason, respondents do engage in self-disclosure, in which an individual shares thoughts, emotional states and personal feelings (Derlega, 1984). The findings in line with the arguments that young people tend to disclose more on social media than in the real life environments to one’s entire network of virtual friends. This is also incongruence with arguments by Boyd (2014) that young people are using social media to free themselves from the adult gaze in order to socialise and explore their identities.

This study found that on Twitter, young people are using it to maintain weak-tie based relationships where users create and maintain larger connection of relationships from which they could draw resources (Donath & Boyd, 2004). Based on these findings, information on Twitter serves as a social process, in which individuals can seek and broadcast requests for support or information (Ellison et al., 2011). The weak ties are important as it can increase access to manyresources including new information and different perspectives.

The PERMA framework used in this study viewed how individuals apply their virtues effectively to help themselves to adapt to different life situations and feel happy and satisfied with their life experiences (Chang et al., 2014). The findings found that in support of positive psychology, respondents do flourish under certain conditions when using Twitter. It helps them to create positive emotions, be happy about their current situation and optimistic about their future. It also helps respondents to cultivate positive traits such as persistence and motivations in helping young people to conceptualize good lives.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by USIM GRAND CHALLENGE GRANT (UGC), Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia under Grant No P1-15-13419-UNI-UGC-FKP

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