For western youth social media has become an everyday occurrence. An abundance of information is delivered right to them. But how do they evaluate the credibility of the information they encounter? Web 2.0 and social media has created an easy access to information, but has also made it harder to identify who the creator of the information is when anybody can create content. Which makes it important to constantly critically evaluate the sources one is faced with. This study aims to examine how adolescents judge the credibility of information they meet on social media, and also how they use social media and how they see themselves as creators of information. The data was accumulated by conducting two group interviews with three participants in each group. The results has been analyzed with two separate theories, cognitive authorities and also with the theory of uses and gratifications. The results showed that they are more critical to information created by sources that the do not know personally, than they are of users that the know on an closer level. The study also shows that they do not perceive that they create content themselves on a regular basis. But they are still constantly connected with their friends on some sort of social media. Based on this study future relevant studies can be made with social media as the focus. This study focus on adolescents with a similar socioeconomic background, the same study but with different socioeconomic backgrounds would be interesting to make. Results in this study shows that an older generation is starting to use social media in a different degree then before, therefore studies in how this generation evaluate information the meet on social media could be interesting since they have an education that differ from the one adolescents get today.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-75791 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Bengtsson, Nikolina |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper (KV) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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