A significant majority of university students in western countries use social media platforms for various reasons as gaining information, staying in contact with friends and family or as way of passing time. In particular Facebook, the most popular social network with over 2 billion monthly users, is an important aspect in everyday practices of university students. The uses and gratifications gained on the platform have been researched in vast amounts. However, there is a small amount of students who do not participate on Facebook and have not been subject to research in scrutiny. Such media resisters actively choose not to be part of the social media platform and the practices it involves. This undergraduate dissertation research aims to find out more about these Facebook resisters. I explore questions concerning the the motives and practices of students who do not use Facebook, the interaction in university life without Facebook and how non-users satisfy the needs and desires users normally satisfied by using Facebook. Within the uses and gratifications approach of researching audiences the audience is described as active, using media to satisfy their personal needs and desires. I apply this approach to non-users of Facebook. By conducting qualitative online questionnaires and a small number of follow up face-to-face interviews with non-Facebook-users, I am likely to find out more about the behaviours, attitudes, feelings of non-users and their reasons of Facebook abstention. My research contributes to existing research about media resisters in general and fills a gap in literature by finding out more about specifically Facebook resisters.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/000529
Andree, Sarah
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of History, Philosophy and Culture
Year: 2018
© The Author(s) Published by Oxford Brookes University