The study deals with the effects of social media addiction to them as college students to know their limitations.
The study is based on two theories- Uses and gratification and media dependency. Uses and gratification are concerned with what people (audiences) do with the media. The theory posits that people are not passive receivers of media messages but active influencers of the message effect. That is, the consumers of media messages have the freewill to decide how they will use the media and how it will affect them. As actively influencing the effect process, media audiences selectively choose, attend to, perceive and retain media messages. The focus is thus, not in media production and transmission functions, but, on media consumption functions. Rather than asking “what kinds of effects occur, under what conditions?” the question becomes “who uses which content, from which media, under which condition, and; for what reasons?” Uses and gratification theory indicates a positive relationship between social media usage and the level of gratification derived from such activity. Generally, users of social media are motivated by similar intrinsic and extrinsic factors ( Amarasinghe, 2010). The theory postulates that people are dependent on the mass media for information needs. Now that social media has become part of people’s daily life, addiction to it has become the resultant effect of over-dependency on it for information, sensation, entertainment, satisfaction etc.