The Relation between Loneliness in Social Life and Facebook Usage

Social networks like Facebook have become one of the most important mass communication vehicles at the present day. It is estimated that today more than 1 billion people use Facebook on the world. Facebook was designed to develop the social attraction in virtual areas. In this type of communication style, users can declare their personal information on their personal page provided by social networking sites and they can share videos and photos with other users or they can supply information to other users about their personal life. Members can see each other's pages and they can communicate with other members with using chat implementation which seems mobile messaging. This interaction and possibility of social networking sites draw attention of young people and adolescents because of providing detailed information for them to develop friendship. On the other hand, young people feel more lonely themselves in modern life style and this has increased the demand of young people for media usage. Especially foreign students leaving their culture and families back come Turkey for their education and they are so sensitive in terms of loneliness and media dependency. This study aims to measure the relation between loneliness level and Facebook usage patterns of foreign students in Turkey. Survey method was used to collect data and data were got together from 316 participants with using face to face questionnaire technique. The results of the study show the relations among participants' loneliness level, daily Facebook usage rates, weekly Facebook usage frequency, Facebook usage experience and Facebook usage reasons. As a first finding, it was found that the most frequent used communication medium was the social media. A large majority (90 %) of the participants stated that they had been using Facebook since 1-6 years with an average duration of 54 minutes each session. Usage motives were given as communicating with friends, getting informed about events and people and leisure time pursuit. The study revealed a positive relationship between loneliness of foreigners and Facebook usage that implies social network usage is increasing with rising loneliness level.