The Role of Social Media on Intercultural Communication Competences

Winda Monika

, Arbi Haza Nasution

, Salhazan Nasution

Department of Library Information, Universitas Lancang Kuning, Pekanbaru, Riau, Indonesia

Department of Informatics Engineering, Universitas Islam Riau, Pekanbaru, Riau, Indonesia

Department of Informatics, Universitas Riau, Pekanbaru, Riau, Indonesia

Keywords:

Social Media, Intercultural Communication

Abstract:

Social media is hitting mainstream lately. Since the advancement of technology, it brings people to interact

with multi cultures users. Regardless most of social media have all of communication features on their ap-

plications, a study ﬁgures out that people tend to use more than one social media for different needs. Social

media is a powerful online tool that allows people to communicate, interact, get connected, share, express idea

and thought and many more functionalities to carry out. In this study, we examine the role of ﬁve widely used

social media on intercultural communication competences. We conducted a survey on international students

of Kyoto University and Tsukuba University, Japan. We try to ﬁgure out the motivation of the people using

each social media on intercultural communication. The result shows that most of the participants are on Face-

book with a motivation to get to know more about their international friends and most of their International

friends are already on Facebook. It also shows that participants use social media with the following moti-

vation: supporting social interaction, proﬁling, information sharing, and communication tools. Social media

enhance participants communication competence in a way that communication among international friends

goes effective, they adapt faster where social media assist them to get along very well with a strong tie, and

ﬁnally, social media enhances their English reading skill.

1 INTRODUCTION

Since the upcoming of Internet, every aspect in hu-

man life changes pertaining the way of people com-

municate one another. These days, distance is not a

matter. As long as someone has access to Internet, in-

teraction and communication among people over con-

tinent is possible to be happened. A channel that fa-

cilitates the user’s interaction and communication is

called social media. Social media makes world seem-

ingly borderless. Huge active users are increasing ev-

ery time, estimated nearly one in four people world-

wide is using social media. Over million active social

media users exist (Metev and Veiko, 2013) and the

number keeps increasing steadily, thus various social

media are continuously invented and enhanced.

People use social media for various purposes.

Most of people use social media because of the need

to connect and interact with others; to gain knowledge

and learn about different opinions and perspective of

issues, topics, and events; and to socialize (Metev and

Veiko, 2013). Moreover, some factors such as age

somehow reﬂects the usage behavior of the tools as

well. Mostly generation Y uses social media for con-

tributing, sharing, searching for, and consuming con-

tent, plus working and playing (Bolton et al., 2013).

This shows that people have motive behind the usage

of the tools. The need to stay connected with others

and gain information are an instance of the user and

the usage behavior.

Undeniably, people who come from different

background, continents, countries, races, and so forth,

are currently on social media. Social media has

brought people from different cultures together in the

“global village” (Metev and Veiko, 2013). Which

means interaction among the social media users is not

limited to the same culture only but also for intercul-

tural communication. Moreover, prior study (Breck-

ling, 2012) states that “social media are changing the

way that information is passed across societies and

around the world”. It comes into questions whether

the existing social media applications support their

users adequately for intercultural communication or

vice versa. Then, what kind of social media function-

alities that helps to encourage intercultural communi-

cation. To do so, ﬁve most used social media were

Monika, W., Nasution, A. and Nasution, S.

The Role of Social Media on Intercultural Communication Competences.

DOI: 10.5220/0010105604830491

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education and Humanity (ICoSEEH 2019) - Sustainable Development in Developing Countr y for Facing Industrial

Revolution 4.0, pages 483-491

ISBN: 978-989-758-464-0

483

selected to be further analyzed their features such as

Line, WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook and Twitter. We

examined the user’s motivation on using the social

media for intercultural communication. Later on, we

analyzed to what extent social media features which

mostly used for intercultural communication enhance

intercultural communication competences.

2 LITERATURE STUDY

2.1 Social Media Application

Social media is a channel that is provided by so-

cial media platform which offers advanced features

as well as functions which support social network-

ing such as sharing ideas, information, knowledge,

and so forth over network. Some social media is

used for chatting and/or making phone call, for in-

stance, Line, WhatsApp, Slack. Other social media

are typical microblogging which allows user to post,

exchange, share the small content such as sentences,

small post, photos, videos, etc., and is also completed

by some communication features such as instant mes-

saging, phone call, video calls, for instance, Facebook

and Twitter. Five popular social media and network-

ing site used mostly for intercultural communication

are Facebook, Line, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack.

Facebook website was launched on February 2004

(Padhye et al., 1999) and it has been gaining huge

popularity since then. News portal online (Committee

et al., 1999) reveals that “Facebook attracted over 130

million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of

8.6 million people”. There are over 800 million users

in the world with a population of 6.9 billion, which

means that about 1 out 12 people has a Facebook ac-

count (Metev and Veiko, 2013).

Line is a regular instant messenger apps with ad-

ditional services such as games, money sending, e-

commerce, as well as various number of emojis. It

was launched in Japan in 2012

. Line is immensely

famous in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia

According to news states that “Line became Japan’s

largest social network in 2013, Japan: 54 million reg-

istered users”

. In March 2019, report said that Line

is more popular than Facebook

Slack was launched in August 2013

. Before

it was launched to public, it was used as a com-

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munication tool among internal employee. Unlike

any other social media apps, this app is integrated

with a large number of third-party services and sup-

ports community-built integrations, such as Google

Drive, Dropbox, Box, GitHub, and so on. In 2015,

Slack passed more than a million daily active users

. There’re more than half a million Slack users in

London and Tokyo

Twitter is being used by over 328 million users

. It is a type microblogging which allows users to

post and broadcast short information over the net-

work. Therefore, it has inﬂuenced intercultural dia-

logue because many people worldwide are focused on

the individual life of others and have desire for con-

nection and knowledge of events (Sawyer and Chen,

2012).

WhatsApp Messenger is a messaging app for

smartphones created in 2009

. It offers features sim-

ilar to SMS. This app has big number of users as well.

WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 bil-

lion messages sent per day

. It is mostly used by

users due to its simplistic functionality.

2.2 Social Media Features

Social media is a powerful online tool that allows peo-

ple to communicate, interact, get connected, share,

express idea and thought and many more functionali-

ties to carry out. People can easily access social media

through an electronic devices such as web-based tech-

nologies on desktops (PC or laptops), or download

services by using mobile devices (e.g., smartphones

and tablets).

To support the needs of users, social media has

been continuously inventing new features on it. Basi-

cally, social media is used for the communication pur-

poses such as frequently used to support verbal (e.g.,

making a video call and phone call) and non-verbal

(e.g., chatting) communication. Nowadays, social

media is used to archiving memories, building reputa-

tions, marketing products, searching for job, shaping

friendship, acquiring knowledge, exploring informa-

tion as well as sharing thought and ideas by creating

podcasts, blogs and so on. Therefore, features such

as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos,

create user proﬁles are embedded in the features.

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2.3 Uses and Gratiﬁcations on

Intercultural Communication

Uses and gratiﬁcations theory (U&G) is a renowned

theory in media research. Gratiﬁcation can be deﬁned

as “feeling of satisfaction” of the use of something.

Basically, the objectives of this theory are to describe

and ﬁgure out the psychological needs that shape peo-

ple’s motive behind their engagement to utilize certain

media for gratiﬁcations that fulﬁll their inherent needs

(Rubin, 1981).

People in social media are coming from multi-

cultures, thus having different personality and behav-

ior in using social media. Regardless most of social

media have all of communication features on their ap-

plications, a study ﬁgures out that people tend to use

more than one social media. A study concluded that

different social media fulﬁll different user needs (Cor-

rea et al., 2010). Many factors effect the use of so-

cial media. Young adults have been found to depend

heavily on the Internet for entertainment and informa-

tion. Further, it reveals that the reason of using social-

networking sites by young adults are ”to experience

selective, efﬁcient, and immediate connection with

others for their (mediated) interpersonal communica-

tion satisfaction and as an ongoing way to seek the

approval and support of other people” (Urista et al.,

2009). That means age inﬂuence the use of the social

media.

A study deﬁned that the reason of use and what

gratiﬁcation will people get from social media are for

social interaction, information seeking, pass time, en-

tertainment, relaxation, communicatory utility, con-

venience utility, expression of opinion, information

sharing, and surveillance/knowledge about others

(Whiting and Williams, 2013). They may also use

the Internet to “connect and maintain social relation-

ships” (Stevens and Morris, 2007). Other study cat-

egorized social media gratiﬁcation into content and

process. Content is driven from acquiring informa-

tion and knowledge, where process occurs from web

browsing or creating content for the website (Kaya-

hara and Wellman, 2007).

There are several researches that have been con-

ducted to examine use and gratiﬁcation on using so-

cial media. However, less study discussing on the mo-

tive for choosing a certain kind of social media spe-

cially used for intercultural communication.

2.4 Intercultural Communication

Competences

Intercultural communication competences (ICC) are

generally deﬁned as abilities of people to communi-

cate and interact with people from multi-cultures. The

study about ICC had been conducted in the past 50

years (Arasaratnam and Doerfel, 2005) and still on-

going. in this 21st century, ICC encounters a unique

research ﬁeld due to the changes of the social inter-

action and communication in society. It used to limit

the scope on face to face communication. But later

on, due to the advancement of technology, the study

is expanded to measure the implication of the vari-

ous media used for communication toward intercul-

tural communication process and competences.

A concept of new media such as social me-

dia would bring a gap as well as challenge in or-

der to attain a successful communication. A study

states that “new media has brought human interaction

and society to a highly interconnected and complex

level, but at the same time challenges the very exis-

tence of intercultural communication in its traditional

sense”(Chen, 2012). Social media which primar-

ily relies on information technology bring the users

in different level of information technology literacy.

People must be able to use and manage their social

media properly. Moreover, to successfully commu-

nicate with people from different cultures, the ability

of global communication competence is a must (Chen

et al., 1998).

Variable of competences was deﬁned varied by

researchers in this ﬁled. Brian H. Spitzberg (1991)

presents a model of interpersonal competence which

consists of motivation, knowledge, and skill in inter-

action (Spitzberg, 1991). These three skills are cru-

cial to develop intercultural communication skills. To

look into detail, Martin and Hammer (1989) exam-

ined social skills perspective which focus on com-

municative function behaviors, verbal and non-verbal

behaviors and conversational management behaviors.

Based on these models, in this study we pick up sev-

eral variables of ICC to be further examined. Those

are communication effectiveness, language compe-

tences and empathy.

3 METHODOLOGY

Survey had been conducted in two public universities

in Japan whose provide international program deliv-

ered in English. Those are University of Tsukuba

and Kyoto University. The target were international

students who come from various countries that have

different educational backgrounds, academic stand-

ing as well as cultures. Although, they were tak-

ing classes given in English which means their En-

glish proﬁciency is already fair, nevertheless English

is not their mother-language. Therefore, we selected

The Role of Social Media on Intercultural Communication Competences

485

this environment as a sample to examine intercultural

communication vibes among them.

There were 55 respondents from two universities

submitted the feedback. The survey is divided into

three parts – Part A, Part B, and Part C. Part A col-

lected the demographic information of the respon-

dents including e.g., university, gender, nationality,

age, academic standing and social media used.

Part B analyzed the motivation behind the usage

of each selected social media i.e., Facebook, Line,

Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack. We chose those so-

cial media due to its popularity among the interna-

tional students in Japan. Despite the type of social

media, we observed some aspect such as strengthen

connection with international friend, feature embed-

ded, and functions of the social media which inﬂuence

the reason. We examined user‘s motivation on inter-

cultural communication by using U&G theory (Whit-

ing and Williams, 2013) as a based line, futhermore

we developed our own questioners to analyse further

the reason of users for choosing those kinds of social

media on intercultural communication. There were

10 question items asked and students were allowed to

choose more than one social media that they use on

the daily basis. The motivation items questionnaire

was utilized from and we added some additional ques-

tion items in accordance with social media usage on

intercultural communication.

Part C examined to what extent of the social me-

dia usage and motivation of the users inﬂuence in-

tercultural communication competence. There were

two variables in this part. The usage as a variable one

includes instant messaging and resource sharing. To

look over each social media as well as the reason of

using those media are covered by part B. The respon-

dents were asked to choose what kind of social media

that they are using for each usage or purpose. The

data of the variable one was collected in part B. Vari-

able two examines the intercultural communication

competences including four aspects, those are com-

munication effectiveness, adaptation, language com-

petence, and empathy. There were 25 questions for

the total. The participants were asked to rate the scale

using Likert scale 1 to 5 scale (“5. Strongly agree”;

“3. Neither”; “1. Strongly disagree”).

4 RESULT

4.1 Demographic Information

Demographic information e.g., age, nationality, aca-

demic standing and social media usage of the 55 stu-

dents is shown in Table 1. It shows that out of 55

total responses conducted in University of Tsukuba

(UoT) and Kyoto University (KU), 66.7% were in the

range of age 20 – 29 years old. Most of the participant

are dominated by Indonesian students (32%). Most

of participant are graduate school students; PhD stu-

dents as (40%) and Master students (37%). In addi-

tion, we found that nearly 96% students were on Face-

book. Male students use Facebook more than female

student. In contrast, others social media for instance

Line, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack were used domi-

nantly by female student. According to Table 1, most

of the participants use more than one social media.

4.2 Social Media That Motivate Users

on Intercultural Communication

Results show that about 8 of 10 questionnaire items,

Facebook is dominantly chosen by the participants as

the most used social media. According to Figure 1,

most of the participants are on Facebook with the fol-

lowing motivations: get to know more about their in-

ternational friends; most of their International friends

are on Facebook; ﬁnd international friends with mu-

tual interest; broaden networking with their interna-

tional friends; help them to keep in touch with their

international friends; their International friends sug-

gest them to use it; utilize it as a resource sharing; and

the last one is for chatting. The percentage are 91%,

91%, 89%, 89%, 87%, 75%, 74%, and 62% respec-

tively. Other results show that Line was chosen as the

2nd most used by the participants due to its function-

ality in creating enclosed group and making a phone

call.

4.3 Intercultural Communication

Competences

Table 2 through Table 5 describe the items and the

average score of each item which measure intercul-

tural communication competence variable. We ana-

lyzed the scale’s internal reliability by calculating its

Cronbach’s α coefﬁcients. As a result, the coefﬁcients

of the four scales were .767, .754, .818, and .607 re-

spectively.

We examined intercultural communication com-

petence of the participants by asking 23 questionnaire

items. We look thoroughly four (4) aspects of inter-

cultural communication competence; communication

effectiveness, adaptation, language competence, and

empathy.

As shown in Table 2, on communication effective-

ness aspect, most of the participants agreed that there

were not any communication barriers with their inter-

national friends (IF) when using chatting as “they do

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486

Table 1: Demographic Information

Demographic

UoT (n = 33 (58.2%)) KU (n = 22 (41.8%)) Total

Male (n=13) Female (n=20) Male (n=17) Female (n=5) 55

Age

20–29 years old 10.52% 24.6% 22.8% 8.77% 66.7%

30–39 years old 12.28% 7.02% 7.02% 1.75% 29.8%

40–49 years old 1.75% 1.75% - - 3.5%

Nationality

Indonesian 7 13 10 2 32 (56%)

Chinese - - 1 - 1 (2%)

Taiwanese - - - 1 1 (2%)

Thailand 3 - 1 1 5 (9%)

Lebanon - - - 1 1 (2%)

Indian - 1 - - 1 (2%)

Sri Lankan - 1 - - 1 (2%)

American 3 2 4 - 9 (16%)

Norway - - 1 - 1 (2%)

Nepali - 1 - - 1 (2%)

Moroccon - 1 - - 1 (2%)

Academic Standing

Undergraduate 1 3 - - 4 (7%)

Master student 3 8 8 3 21 (37%)

P.hD student 6 8 7 2 23 (40%)

ExchanceStudent 1 - - - 1 (2%)

ResearchStudent 2 1 2 - 5 (9%)

Social Media Male Female n

Facebook (FB) 30 25 52 (96%)

Line 20 24 44 (77%)

Twitter 7 10 17 (30%)

WhatsApp (WA) 5 10 15 (26%)

Slack 9 12 21 (37%)

Table 2: Communication Effectiveness

Items Mean Std Dev

I don’t ﬁnd any difﬁculty commu-

nicating with my IF on phone call

3.49 1.14

I don’t ﬁnd any difﬁculty commu-

nicating with my IF on chatting

4.11 0.93

I understand with the context of

information shared by my IF

3.92 0.87

I don’t mind making mistake

(such as typo, grammar-error, so

on) while chatting on social media

with my IF

4.02 0.95

α = .767

not ﬁnd any difﬁculty communicating with my IF on

chatting” was selected with mean 4.11.

The second aspect examined is language compe-

tence. As shown in Table 4, due to all participants

are ﬂuent in English where English is as their sec-

ond language, therefore “they easily understand or

relate to what is being discussed with their interna-

tional friends on social media” is fairly chosen with

mean 3.65. In addition, it seems that social media

is fairly enhancing the participant‘s English reading,

Table 3: Adaptation

Items Mean Std Dev

I don’t judge my IF during com-

municating or interacting with me

through social media

3.54 1.09

Social media makes me can get

along very well with my IF

3.68 1.01

Social media helps me bonding or

having a close relationship with

my IF

3.54 0.88

My IF helps me to survive in the

university through social media

3.07 1.14

My IF help me to settle in Japan

through social media

2.98 1.07

I rely a lot on my IF through social

media

3.81 1.01

α = .754

writing, speaking and listening skills with mean 3.54,

3.47, 3.14, and 3.08 respectively. Moreover, it seems

that most of the participants preferred to communicate

through chat (mean 3.63) over phone-call (3.54).

The third aspect analyzed is empathy. As shown

in Table 5, most of the participants agreed to show

The Role of Social Media on Intercultural Communication Competences

487

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

My International Friends Suggest Using This Social Media

Most of My International Friends Are on This Social Media

Help Me to Keep In Touch With My International Friends

Get to Know More My International Friends

Broaden Networking with Other International Friends

Find International Friends with Mutual Interest

Resource Sharing Platform with My International Friends

Used the Most When Texting My International Friends

Used the Most When Calling My International Friends

Enclosed Group for Discussion My International Friends

Percentage of Response

Questionnaire item

Slack WA Twitter Line FB

Figure 1: Motivation on Intercultural Communication Using Social Media.

Table 4: Language Competence

Items Mean Std Dev

I am conﬁdent with my English writing skill when chatting with

my IF through social media

3.63 1.14

I am conﬁdent with my English-speaking skill when communi-

cating with my IF through social media

3.54 1.16

I easily understand or relate to what is being discussed with my

IF on social media

3.65 0.96

I feel social media helps me to enhance my English writing skill 3.47 1.28

I feel social media helps me to enhance my English-speaking

skill

3.14 1.22

I feel social media helps me to enhance my English reading skill 3.54 1.20

I feel social media helps me to enhance my English listening

skill

3.08 1.27

α = .818

their empathy toward other international friends by

“always trying to make their international friends feel

comfortable communicating with them on social me-

dia”. This item has a mean 3.95. Moreover, most of

the participants agreed that “if they don‘t understand

during the chatting and the context of the information

being discussed, they would not hesitate to reconﬁrm

and ask their International Friends” with mean 3.87

and 2.17 respectively. In addition, for phone call was

chosen fairly with mean 3.02.

5 DISCUSSION

5.1 Survey Respondents - Gender Ratio,

Age, Nationality, Academic

Standing, Social Media Usage

Previous study (Ye and Murota, 2014) mentioned that

the younger student with higher level of English lan-

guage ability would like to communicate with for-

eigner more. Therefore, to conﬁrm the factor, we an-

alyzed age toward intercultural communication com-

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488

Table 5: Empathy

Items Mean Std Dev

If I don’t understand during chatting, I will reconﬁrm with my

3.87 0.76

If I don’t understand during the enclosed group discussion on

social media, I don’t mind to re-explain several times.

2.17 0.73

If I don’t understand during making phone call, I ask my other

friend to help me instead

3.02 1.00

I don’t avoid communicating on social media with whom I don’t

understand well his/her English (English native speaker)

3.72 1.08

I don’t avoid communicating on social media with whom I don’t

understand well his/her English (English nonnative speaker)

3.64 1.13

I always try to make my international friends feel comfortable

communicating with me on social media

3.95 0.93

α = .607

petence by conducting regression analysis. We did

not analyze the English language ability of the stu-

dents because we assumed that their English level is

already high since they enroll to the English program.

Fig. 1 shows age (β=-.13, p<.05) where the result

apparently was similar to the previous study.

In this study, the participant are students who

utilize social media to communicate both with their

same country and international friends frequently. Ta-

ble 1 shows that mostly the participants are domi-

nated by young generation or commonly called gen-

eration Y. Generation Y are the ﬁrst generation to

spend their entire lives in digital environment; infor-

mation technology profoundly affects how they live

and work (Mayﬁeld, 2008). Generation Y actively

contributes, shares, searches for and consumes con-

tent – plus works and plays- on social media (Chen,

2012). In addition, participants are mostly well ed-

ucated which have a good level of academic stand-

ing. No wonder that most of them are already being

a digital native. Nevertheless, there is no signiﬁcant

relationship between the number of social media used

with the level of academic standing of the participants

(p>.05).

As Table 1 mentioned that mostly the participants

use more than one social media. Users do not embrace

a single form social media but, tend to employ a range

of tools for communication (Quan-Haase et al., 2002).

As shown in the Table 1, one participant at least uti-

lizes two social media tools for communication. Find-

ings show that Facebook and Line are used mostly by

the participants as a communication tool. Social me-

dia as a communication tool has basic features such as

texting and making phone call. For these basic func-

tions, Line is used for phone call while Facebook is

for texting. In addition, social networking such as

ﬁnding more international friends, resource sharing,

broaden networking and so on, Facebook is chosen

the most.

Facebook is a complete and huge social media

platform. It is used not only as a communication tool

but also micro-blogging which allow user to share

their and others thought through posted information,

videos and pictures on the wall. It helps dissemi-

nating information goes faster through out the con-

nected friends. In addition, Facebook is utilized with

emoticon on the chat box, although Line is also hav-

ing emoticon, but Facebook’s is chosen more prefer-

able by the participants. Moreover, Facebook reg-

isters personal information of the users and that in-

formation is accessed openly so that people may use

it for proﬁling. General information such as school,

working place, address, current location, hobbies and

so forth are easily bringing user to get connected and

ﬁnd mutual international friends with the same inter-

est. Above all functions, Facebook and Line are sub-

sequently creating, developing and deepening social

engagement and physiological attachment among the

users. Which later on effect dependencies toward this

channel.

5.2 Use and Gratiﬁcation of Social

Media for Intercultural

Communication

Results show that participants use social media for

various motives or reasons. Here are some motives

which reﬂect the gratiﬁcation they get from using

such kind of the social media features.

• Supporting Social Interaction. According to ﬁnd-

ings as shown in Figure 1, several motives be-

hind the usage of social media in intercultural

communication are revealed such as for ‘ﬁnd-

ing international friends with mutual interest”,

‘getting to know more about their international

The Role of Social Media on Intercultural Communication Competences

489

friends”,“helping them to keep in touch with their

international friends”, “broadening the network-

ing with their international friends”. Therefore,

it reveals that social media ﬁrmly supports creat-

ing, maintaining the strong tie as well as expand-

ing network.

• Proﬁling. Features of social media that provide

personal information openly to public allow users

doing proﬁling toward stranger. As proﬁling is

very crusial in social media, this kind of features

enable users to analyse someone’s bahaviour and

personalities that is reﬂected from their post and

information shared on their social media.

• Information Sharing. Feature of social media that

enable users to share information in multi-format

(e.g., as text, image, code, etc) is needed. Since

the participants are university students, this kind

of feature is commonly and actively used in their

daily basis.

• Communication tools. According to ﬁnding in

Figure 1, social media used as a communication

tool is voted as the last place after support social

interaction and information sharing. Most of the

participants use social media for texting and call-

ing. Findings also show that participants prefer

use social media for making phone call over tex-

ting.

5.3 Intercultural Communication

Competence Enhancement

As shown in Table 2, even though most of the stu-

dents are not English native speaker and in Japan,

English is considered not even as a second language,

communication among international friends goes ef-

fective where most of them agree that they do not ﬁnd

any difﬁculty communicating one another whether by

chatting or phone call.

According to Table 3, most of participants agree

that social media helps them to adapt with their new

international friends. Social media support their adap-

tation faster where social media assists them to get

along very well and bond the relationship to be strong

tie. As mentioned by (Mayﬁeld, 2008) there is a

signiﬁcant relationship between ISs’ communication

media usage and adaptation situations. Nevertheless,

there is no high dependency toward their international

friends via social media.

As shown in Table 4, majority of the participants

agree that social media helps them to enhance their

English reading skill. Social media is updating its

content every second, thus in order to keep informed

makes users have to read the latest news on social me-

dia. In addition, the ﬁndings show that most of partic-

ipants already have good empathy. it is shown from

majority of the participants agree that they always try

to make their international friends feel comfortable

during communication with them on social media.

6 CONCLUSIONS

Social media is a powerful online tool that al-

lows people to communicate, interact, get connected,

share, express idea and thought and many more func-

tionalities to carry out. We examined the role of ﬁve

widely used social media, i.e., Facebook, Line, Twit-

ter, WhatsApp, and Slack on intercultural communi-

cation competences. We conducted a survey on 55 in-

ternational students of Kyoto University and Tsukuba

University, Japan. The result shows that most of

the participants are on Facebook with a motivation

to get to know more about their international friends

and most of their International friends are already on

Facebook. It also shows that participants use social

media with the following motivation: supporting so-

cial interaction, proﬁling, information sharing, and

communication tools. Social media enhance partici-

pants communication competence in a way that com-

munication among international friends goes effec-

tive, they adapt faster where social media assist them

to get along very well with a strong tie, and ﬁnally,

social media enhances their English reading skill.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by Universitas Islam

Riau.

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