Is Social Media Still “Social”?

Abstract

Social media has come to be one of the most important platforms to connect human from everywhere in the world as an interactive and effective communique device. It has been broadly used as a communication tool in numerous forms. It is created to construct and preserve relationships regardless geographical or time constraints. However, social media has been increased its function as basically, a socialization too to greater utilization and functions in diverse fields. As a result, these studies discussed the utilization and role of social media, whether it serves as a socialization tool among the users, or it has been diluted to other purposes consisting of in educational or organizational fields. The result collected indicates the relationship between the pattern of use in social media and the purpose of using social media. Uses and gratifications theory and media dependency theory are used in the theoretical framework of this research. This research is carried out by using survey questionnaire on Facebook users aged between 18 and 27 years old who live in Klang Valley, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The result confirmed that the social media users are less contributing contents in social media, which has directly affected the socialization role of social media.