Özet:
This study has been designed to explore the changes in social life of university
students both online and in daily life due to the developments and wide usage of
social media. Moreover, it was particularly chosen to be a comparative case study to
examine whether the context affects these changes and to make the study more
comprehensive. The study focused on issues such as relationships and
communication with family, friends (close, far, romantic) and formal contacts on
social media, privacy, the sharing culture and changes in daily life due to using social
media. The study aims to contribute to the understanding of social change and
transformation especially in social life brought about by using social media. The
study was conducted as a comparative case study in which students from different
departments of various public and private universities in Istanbul and Rome took
part. Participants were chosen from undergraduate and graduate students who were
between the ages of twenty to thirty and active users on at least one social media
platform or application. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with
students. The findings of the study indicated that social media has different effects on
various kind of relationships. Sharing is seen as a habitual, automatic, collective
action. Sharing is believed to have evolved into ‘showing’ and serves different
purposes. Tough they may be ground for serious debates and news, social media
platforms are also spaces to have fun and to hang out. One important function of
social media is the fact that it works like an archive which is easy to reach for users.
Its positive and negative effects on daily life are observed to be almost equal. Privacy
is still important, however, for certain platforms or content publicity can be
preferred. The results in the two cases of the study were found to be very similar,
there were only a small number of minor differences.
