Metaphoric Perceptions of Teachers, Students, and Parents towards Social Media

Abstract

Social media, one of the modern communications and socialization channels, has become one of the indispensable tools of education. This study, it was aimed to reveal the perceptions of teachers, students, and parents about the concept of “social media” through metaphor. In this study, which used a phenomenology design, which is one of the qualitative research methods, the data were collected using a structured online metaphor form. A total of 166 people participated in the study with the role of teacher, student, or parent. Among these, responses matching the metaphor structure of 136 people were analyzed using the content analysis method. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that the metaphors were classified under the categories of “Addiction”, “Not real”, “Everything is in it”, “Communication channel”, “Usage”, “Indispensable”, “Feature”, and “Harmful”. The participants mostly used the metaphors of “bottomless well”, “life”, “drugs”, “swamp”, “news tool”, “alcohol”, “mask”, “car”, and “virus” for social media. In line with these results, to benefit from the advantages of using social media in education, it is recommended to provide awareness training to teachers, students, and parents. The study also concluded that the perceptions of the participants towards social media were generally negative.