THE EFFECT OF USING HASHTAGS ON TWITTER TO THE GENERAL STUDENT ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: A CASE STUDY OF MAASAI MARA UNIVERSITY.

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the rising rates of using social media platforms, twitter has become an information sharing and communication platform. Television and radio personalities talk about it. It is included in business cards and almost every organization website asks you to follow it. Hashtags, a form of twitter language, are used in Twitter to classify messages, propagate ideas and also to promote specific topics and people. In this study, the researcher present a linguistic-inspired study of how these tags are created, used and disseminated by the members of information networks. The researcher looks into the usage of hashtags in Maasai Mara University (MMU) twitter handle and studies the types of hashtags used and their purpose. The study also looks at the linguistic aspects around the hashtag as well as how the use of these hashtags affects the general communication of the students involved. The researcher identified interesting aspects around the hashtag that led to the belief that there existed a relationship between gender and type of hashtag. The first part of this study builds upon a set of linguistic features to quantify the language of the hashtag. The second part introduces a theoretical framework, which conducts an analysis of the given phenomena under study. Applying this analytical framework, the researcher gathered samples of tweets and looked into the linguistics of twitter hashtags via a quantitative and qualitative approach. The researcher presents several key insights: (1) Twitter hashtag is a content bearing symbol that plays a key role in tweets, (2) Twitter users in the university appear to be developing other uses for the symbol (3) Hashtags command the number of audience a user has and (4) Twitter usage not only affects the students language but all also their social circles. As hashtags are created by the users, they can either be accepted by other members of the network or not. In this manner, some propagate and thrive, while others die immediately afterbirth and are restricted to a few messages. In this work, the researcher examines aspects of the dissemination of hashtags in Twitter, aiming at understanding the process of propagation of innovative hashtags guided by the linguistic theory