New Age Media And Cyber Psychology: The Perpetration Of Cyber Bullying Among University Students

Abstract

Bullying has long been a concern of youth advocates which has dominated the current social issues in our daily life. This research work constitutes digital violence through the epistemology of social media through the use of smartphones and the internet among university students. Whereas misuse of new age media is known as cyberbullying practices which is being practicing by university students. Increasing cases of cyberbullies in educational institutions assume the recent surge and widespread application of information communication technologies (ICTs) in educational institutions whereas results indicated numerous areas that lead to cyberbullying behavior. This study was designed in quantitative methodology and data was collected from university students. Moreover, a positivist research paradigm was used to infer the logical consequences of cyberbullying practices among university students. A self-administered questionnaire was designed for the cross-sectional survey data collection. The use of such technology is easily available to university students anonymously which frequently targets vulnerable people through internet anonymity. For this study, scales and subscales were designed to find out cyberbullying practices whereas correlation with social media uses and cyberbullying perpetration (visual/sexual perpetration) had corresponding effects i.e. (r= .145 ** p<0.01).
The findings show that these types of practices have been caused by abhorrent effects on common students in the academic arena. While cyberbullying perpetration (social exclusion perpetration) evokes ill digital practices by including or excluding someone to
annoy for personal gain whereas little less than half of the respondents agreed with social exclusion which affected the academic activities of the students. In addition, these practices became embarrassed for students’ interest in education which resurged because of procrastinating parents’ solicits in a fugitive manner.