The construction of social media is quite large in encouraging new voters from among students in determining their choices in the Presidential Election, Legislative Election, and Regional Election compared to conventional media. The personal experiences of students can change after following the news on social media.
This becomes the finding or conclusion of research conducted by the research team of the Department of Sociology, Universitas Brawijaya, chaired by Dr. Mondry, M.Sos on students who are new voters at the university, after the simultaneous Presidential Election, Legislative Election, and Regional Election that took place throughout Indonesia.
Mondry said that the social construction built by social media turned out to be quite strong in encouraging students who are new voters to determine their choices. It can even change the candidate of their choice that they had previously decided to choose.
He said that young first-time voters, students, are easily “tempted” by the intense information from the media, especially social media about the names of presidential election pairs, legislative candidates, and regional head candidates who must be elected. Moreover, the information or news is spiced up with brilliant achievements, presidential election pairs or candidates.
Apart from the problem of young age who are easily “tempted” by information, according to him, the awareness of Universitas Brawijaya’s students towards politics is sufficient and is believed to continue to increase. This is because each individual has a collective memory related to the presidential election and has their own meaning of the presidential election. This triggers all first-time voters who are students to pay more attention to issues related to politics.
Therefore, the doctor of media sociology proposed that all mass media should have official accounts on various social media platforms possibly. In this way, it is hoped that the young generation who like to access social media will get information from media that can be accounted for, not information from unclear parties, and may spread hoax news.
“This research uses the theory of Construction of Social Reality from Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, with a phenomenological approach from Husserl and data analysis using Moustakas analysis,” he explained. (mondry/VQ/ UB PR/Trans. Iir)
