What we do on social media! Social representations of schoolchildren's activities on electronic communication platforms

Olugbenga A Ige

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04584

Abstract

Researchers might be wondering whether the use of social media by students raises any ethical issues? It is my opinion that with the astronomical increase in the use of social networking websites or platforms by students, ethical issues are progressively important. The astronomical increase in the use of social networking platforms by minors raises ethical questions in school ecologies. This study investigated the ethical issues in social media usage among secondary school students in a developing context. A semi-structured questionnaire that elicited information on the school children's home background, social media operated, and mode of connection to the social media was used to collect data. The questionnaire gave the students the opportunity to write their responses to the interview questions freely. Mixed methods such as constant comparative techniques and descriptive statistical methods were used to analyze data from the one hundred and thirty school children that participated in this research. The results indicated that Facebook is the most operated social networking website by the selected schoolchildren. Most of the schoolchildren operating the popular social networking accounts signed up before the age of thirteen with the help of their biological sisters and brothers. Themes such as cyber pornography, sexting, cyber stalking, cyber bullying, cyber hacking, and abusive language emanated from the individual qualitative interviews. The concluding part of this article answers questions on the impact of new communication technologies on psycho-social adjustment of school children in developing countries.

Highlights

Why should children utilize social media in an ethical way? Scholars have concurred that this question is interesting since teachers across the world have a mission to develop children's ethical values and evaluate their ethical competences (Lilja et al, 2017:1). Yaros (2012) posited that social network sites allow personalization of users' public persona usually accompanied by communicative sharing of information with personal networks
This discourse has shown that Facebook is the most widely used mobile social network among the selected secondary school students
What attracted the selected students to Facebook was not explored in this study

Summary

Introduction

Why should children utilize social media in an ethical way? Scholars have concurred that this question is interesting since teachers across the world have a mission to develop children's ethical values and evaluate their ethical competences (Lilja et al, 2017:1). Yaros (2012) posited that social network sites allow personalization of users' public persona usually accompanied by communicative sharing of information with personal networks. The second discovery is the access that physicians have to their patients' information on the Internet, which is not available in normal health-care settings These ethical scenarios led the American Medical Association to recommend that health-care providers should use privacy settings to protect personal information and familiarize themselves with privacy policies of diverse social media applications. These safety measures adopted by the American Medical Association becomes herculean to adopt in schools because of the dynamic nature of school ecologies, teachers' professional associations, and governing of schools

Methods

Results

Conclusion