The Impact of Social Media on Cultural Adaptation Process: Study on Chinese Government Scholarship Students

摘要

In the globalization era, social media become more popular in everyone’s daily life with its user friendly and effective functions. Social media support the people across the world in communicating, meeting new people, making socialization, sharing knowledge, learning different experiences and interacting with each other instead of distance and separation between persons. Moreover, social media can encourage the increasing of intercultural adaptation level of people who are facing different cultural experiences in new communities. The study shows that people use social media to become more adaptable with the new cultures of the host countries and to preserve their connections with home countries. This paper attempts to find out how social media shape the intercultural adaptation process and bridge the connection with their home countries while they are in new community analyzing on 15 international students who are currently studying in China with the support of Chinese government scholarship program. In-depth interviews using qualitative method are applied in this research. Depending on the analysis result, the discussions are openly stated about the impact of social media in cultural adaptation process.