This chapter focuses on uses and gratifications of social media use among college students in the United Arab Emirates and in Kuwait for three social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Mixed methodologies are duly applied (quantitative and qualitative) to explore various use and gratifications factors, as well as other social factors among a youth that contributes to the adoption of these social network sits (SNSs). Moreover, several statistical tests were performed to analyze collected data. A few research articles are published about new and social media platform use in the region; however, comparative studies were rarely noticed regarding this subject. The survey includes (N=190) samples between Kuwaiti and Emirati students. Conclusively, the study reveals that the main use and gratification reason for using the abovementioned social media platforms amongst college youth is entertainment, while the main social reason is identification.
TopIntroduction
Technological developments and innovations have had a massive impact on the information and communication system (Kosyakova et al. 2020; Widjaja et al. 2020). Such technological advancement is important in the use of the internet to foster information dissemination and reception (Blok et al. 2020; Rzheuskyi et al. 2020; Sarti et al. 2020). The social medium which has established several networks have gained admiration and receptiveness over the years (Killian et al. 2019; McClure and Seock, 2020). “The concept of Social Media (SM) has been on top of the agenda for many business executives” Pourkhani et al. 2019; p. 2)
In a general term, Social media are websites and internet-based applications that permit users to produce and share information. (Boyd & Ellison, 2008; Chiu el at., 2013) Individuals utilize social media websites such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. to build and maintain relationships or reconnect with lost companions (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Alwagait et al. 2015; Michikyan et al. 2015; Nasrullah and Khan, 2019). These social media collect personal data from users in the form of profile data as a requirement for establishing connection link (Pempek et al. 2009). However, social media communication is not only formed via individuals representing themselves by creating their profiles, but also those individuals are allowed to generate their own contents, display, and interact with the contents other, friends or other online users (Ding and Jiang 2014; Spasojevic et al. 2014; Zarrinkalam et al. 2015; Raghuram et al. 2016; Seghouani et al. 2019).
Social media has become an addiction to the users (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Elantheraiyan and Shankarkumar, 2019; Nasrullah and Khan, 2019). It has been researched that use of Facebook comes on the second number after the use of several additive substances such as alcohol, cigarettes, and others where the individual finds it difficult to break the usage (Juergensen and Leckfor, 2018). Social media does not only seem to have effect on our society but it actually has changed our lives (Ariel and Avidar, 2014), even our way of thinking is changed due to the social websites. Social media has changed the way people behave (King, 2015). Social media has had impact on individuals (Chen et al. 2019; Talwar et al. 2019; Alalwan, 2018) and communities (Simon et al. 2013; Kamboj et al. 2018; Wang et al. 2019), organization (Namisango and Kang, 2019; Ihm, 2019; Steffens et al. 2019; Sideri et al. 2019), and politics (Hong and Nadler, 2012; Anim et al. 2019; Miller, 2019; Crilley and Gillespie, 2019). These are some of the several examples where social media has strong influence.