Ozan Gokdemir

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Doucette, John

Area of Concentration

Computer Science

Abstract

One of the highlights of the 21st century is arguably the phenomenal rise of social media. Widespread social media usage permeates all parts of society: from adolescents to senior citizens, from metropolitan cities to remote rural communities. Although social media platforms provide their users with an unprecedentedly powerful channel of connection to the rest of the world, and thus, in theory, facilitate community building; the research community is concerned by these platforms’ negative impact on social connectedness, sense of belonging, and self-reported happiness levels among younger users. We hypothesize that extensive social media usage is inimical to social connectedness, sense of belonging, and social inclusivity on New College of Florida’s campus. This thesis not only aims to illustrate the extent to which face-to-face communication on New College’s campus is hindered by social media, but also it proposes a practical solution to alleviate the social isolation and loneliness reported by the members of the campus community. Our approach is a social experiment facilitated by Convo, an Android application that we developed and deployed on New College’s campus specifically for this research. Convo allows New College students to locate their peers on campus who are willing to have a face-to-face conversation and socialize with new people. We gathered data on self-reported loneliness and happiness from participants prior to and after their participation in the study using Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale and Subjective Happiness Scale, respectively. We aim to investigate whether a tool like Convo contributes to social connectedness in the New College community based on a comparative analysis of the data gathered through surveys from the volunteer participants and the broader campus community. Convo accomplished its mission as a proof of concept by facilitating multiple conversations between individuals who demonstrated low self-reported happiness and high self-reported loneliness levels prior to the study. Although the post-study survey data we gathered from our participants yields promising results for Convo’s performance in counteracting social isolation, this data is gathered from a very small sample of the student body. Therefore, we leave making decisive conclusions to future research to be conducted in a larger community.

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