abstract

The current study is all about exploring society's two most earmarked aspects, specifically for the school level – personality and social media. This work examines the effects and relationships between these aspects specifically for students in South Tripura. How the digital world was introduced, penetrated and rapidly multiplied in this generation and how it became so popular in the most vulnerable, sensitive developmental stage of humans are the concerning subjects for society. Though for people, these digital networking sites like WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, Twitter, Emo, etc. have advantages like communications at an international and international level, personality building, exploring the new world and many more. Student life mainly is at the school level; it is the most vulnerable stage of learning, where they are sensitive to every topic, they can be influenced easily and they don't have the ability to understand what will be good or bad for them. Social media has achieved beyond its limit, as it has the ability to change someone's life; it has the power to regulate lives. In the rapidly increasing era of social media and its devastating effect on the lives of those innocent school students have become the crucial topic for deep thinking.

A descriptive survey took place for the current investigation. Total school students: boys & girls are selected from both urban & rural regions collectively to achieve the maximum accuracy for this study. The selection process was done by the researcher through the random sampling method. The data were collected by personality and social media questionnaires in all the one districts of South Tripura. To assess the variables, the researcher used the adapted version of Prof. K.S. Misra's personality test, “Five Personality Trait Inventory". For the collection of data on social media, the researcher also used a standardised test given by Shaloosaini and Prof. (Dr) Parminder Kaur, "Internet Usage Scale”.

The collected data was assessed in Microsoft Excel through appropriate statistical techniques, such as mean, standard deviation, percentage analysis, t-test, z-test, chi-square test, correlation, and multiple correlations, depending on the nature of the objectives and hypotheses.

According to the findings of this study, collected in the South Tripura context, the social media engagements of school students have a very weak negative correlation with the personality traits. It refers to the fact that the use of social media has very little to no connection to changing the individuality of school students. The identity, self, and mind peculiarity variations in person to person and learners to learners are not that permeable and can spontaneously change just because of the intensity of engaging in digital networking sites.

In conclusion, the digital era of human lives has done so much evolution; it has successfully evolved mankind from difficult existence to smooth subsistence. This study has been done to investigate and analyse either if social media can alter the main feature of school students or if the exorbitance of social media is associated with the identity of under-18-year-old learners.