Social media appeared at the end of the 1990s, and they have been in vast increase since 2003. Nowadays, the biggest social media have more than a billion users. Due to the increase in the number of users, the profitability of such media has risen as well, because commercial social media earn on account of the users, their time and data. Thus, the founders are trying to engage the users extremely more towards active usage, which - according to the research regarding youths’ time spend on social media - they are also succeeding.
Social media can also have good attributes. We have noticed that youths use social media for organizing their free time as well, however due to the addictive elements they spend more time on them as they would otherwise. We have tried to find a social media, which youths could communicate on, connect with each other and within interest groups and arrange to socialize face to face. At the same time, such a social media should not have addictive elements, at the expense of which youths would spend more time in front of a screen. Not finding a social media that would meet such criteria, we have created an online application GoOff.
We tested the application GoOff in a primary school, where we were finding out how nine graders of a primary school would use this application and start a social media. By observing their behaviour on social media, we took into account friendships among students and their degree of loneliness, we assessed without using application. During our research we noticed some differences regarding the factor of loneliness and the use of the application GoOff as well. In this research we have learnt that the lonelier students participated in fewer events and that the gamification of this social media was an additional encouragement for socializing face to face with the students who used this application actively.
We included some video to raise awareness of safe internet use, however they didn’t turn out to be efficient.
The students who did not use browsers adapted for this application, were less active due to the poorer user experience. The available time of the students to socialize and have additional activities had the biggest impact on the attendance at events. That was what limited the use of this application the most; because as a reason for not using it, the students listed exactly this most often.
|