Smartphones and Self-Broadcasting among College Students in an Age of Social Media

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of smartphones for self-broadcasting via social media among college students. Based on motivation and network externalities theories, our survey of a public university's college students confirmed our hypotheses that network size, years of experience using social media and the time spent on social media positively predict their frequency of self-broadcasting on their smartphones. The results suggest that 85.2% of college students self-broadcast at least once a month by updating their status on SNS and students are likely to self-broadcast within their network. Most students set their profile privacy setting as private or semi-private. But privacy setting does not affect self-broadcast frequency.