Social Media - A New Chapter in Social Problems or A New Technique to Study Social Problems

Abstract

The term "Mass Media" has been drastically replaced by “Social Media” and the change has made the greatest impact in our society. With the advancement in technology especially in the field of communication, knowledge dissemination process through social media has been widely affected. The degree of accessibility and validity of particular knowledge shared through social media remains questionable as it challenges the fundamental way of knowledge generation, knowledge sharing and knowledge validation process. Though through social media, knowledge is spread in faster and swift manner but unsupervised use of social media remains at centre as a propeller to new age social problems associated with it. Because of this, social media has been considered both as a “subject” and a “tool” when it comes to understand social problems. It felt important to take this study from the social work perspective in order to understand how social work academician operationalise “social media”. A qualitative study was taken up with students and teachers associated with social work institutions based in Gujarat with an objective to see their views on social media. The study explored if the social media was considered as an add-on to existing social problems in the syllabus and society or they considered the social media as a platform to study existing social problems; more specifically psychosocial issues. This study takes a critical take on social media as a tool to be used in their field work and as one of the associated learning methods to learn social work practice.