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Twitter Uses and Gratifications of High School Students

Abstract

Because of its growing popularity among young adults and its real time nature, Twitter was the social network chosen for this research. Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to produce 140 character bursts of information that are called tweets. Twitter was developed in 2006 to be an outlet for individuals to say what they were doing in the allotted amount of characters (Maxwell, 2012). Twitter gave users the ability to share moments of their lives as they were happening (Williams, 2009). The advantage of being able to send updates in real time led Twitter to be a source of valuable information during natural disasters. Eight percent of Internet users are Twitter users (Smith, 2010). The social networking site is popular among young adults, which makes the high school student population appropriate participants for this study. The study was conducted on 360 of high school students in Kuwait. The data obtained by the survey was analyzed and commented upon using the SPSS program. As the results show, majority of the participants use Twitter on their smart phone for 3-4 hours per day, and use it to meet new people, to follow the local news, and to discuss and exchange of views. Also the results stated that the majority of the students use twitter as a source of information, and never use it as a source of news because the doubt its’ credibility.

Menawer Alrajehi

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