Social Media Usage in Improvement of Vocabulary and Perception

The Effects of Social Media Usage in the Improvement of Individual Vocabulary and Individual Perception
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May 16, 2021
Changes made from the first draft
The first draft was shallow, with scanty details about the research problem. The final draft has addressed these gaps by adding more details in most of the first draft sections. The amendments on the introduction included confining the study to Twitter only instead of the entire social media platforms. The changes made in the literature review section included adding one more article on the already cited sources. The final draft also elaborates in detail on the initial sources. In the methodology and data analysis section, the final draft introduced the use of Survey Monkey Software to reach global respondents on Twitter. Generally, the final draft uses is more detailed with several examples about the research topic drawn from different parts of the globe.
Final Draft
Introduction
The emergence of social media has affected language in several ways. Slangs used in countries like Jamaica is now spread in Africa and other parts of the globe. The global spread and acceptance of social media, which primarily uses language, raises questions on how it affects individual language. An endless debate exists on whether human language and vocabulary can help shape the way people perceive their world. Most mainstream linguistics does not support this argument. Among the few studies that support it is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which suggests that the structure of a language affects its speakers globally, meaning that people's perception is relative to their spoken language (Chandler, 1994).
Prior studies have shown that a culture's language and vocabulary can somehow influence how an individual would perceive his immediate environment, given that such languages are also merely derived through the constant interaction of humankind with its external environment CITATION Mad18 \l 1033 (Madhusoodanan, 2018). For instance, African Americans speak a unique language often embedded in hip hop music. They used hip hop music to protest societal injustices when African Americans were mistreated and discriminated against by the whites. The genre developed into a music genre from a method of protest cultivating the language used in the people's usual way of living. Nonetheless, as could be seen from the various 'ideoscapes' that are happening in this highly globalized and digitalized world, new pieces of information have become readily available for consumption for everyone CITATION App90 \l 1033 (Appadurai, 1990). With a single click of one's mobile device, one becomes aware of the culture, language, and even the vocabulary of societies living on the opposite side of the planet.
Accordingly, this research work would like to focus on how constant exposure to social media can improve one's vocabulary and, ultimately, his perception of the external environment. To do this, the study will look for the top words or phrases that are trending in Twitter and conduct a survey that would measure the level of understanding and comprehension of users who have heard about the word as compared to those who find the word as foreign or unfamiliar in their nat...