I will be sticking with my idea from the beginning. I do not want to change my focus because I personally believe that social media has had a negative impact on our in person interactions; but doing this research will hopefully let me know if I am being biased towards social media.
I intend to focus on communication in the workplace or professional settings and at home i.e. friends and family. My main question is has social media given a platform to people to be more opinionated than they would in “real” life. Because of social media we are now aware of injustices around the world and in our country so I want to know how well people are able to communicate their perspectives online versus when talking to families and friends in person. Are we better at expressing ourselves online than we are when giving speeches in schools or at work.
While I have not performed any research yet, I have located some databases through the Forsyth Library that I think will be useful to me: Sage Premier, Communication and Mass Media Complete and Communication and Mass Media Collections. I would start with these three because the last two deal specifically with communication. I believe I have a better chance of finding exactly what I am looking for because these databases may include information that is more in depth. Sage premier is described as a multi disciplinary database. I may not be able to find exactly what I need here but I may get ideas on the direction my research can lead.
It will be interesting to see where your research topic leads you. It might be that you’ll end up more focused on social media use in personal settings instead of focused on professional platforms. I to see that people are too quick to fire off heartful comments through social media before thinking how their comment might make someone feel versus how they might stop in think if communicating in person.
I think this is a great topic to explore and agree with your thoughts. My only question would be if you are planning on focusing on a certain type of social media platform? The reason I mainly ask this is because there some media platforms that have some sort of video call and I feel that could be good topic to talk about in your research because video calls feel like a hybrid of sorts for face to face communication.