The Impacts of New Media Technologies on Interpersonal Communication: A Case Study of Teacher-Student Interactions at EMU during COVID-19 Pandemic

In the 21st century, new media technologies have changed the way people communicate by offering technology-mediated communication. Moreover, it caused radical changes in most of the fields such as communication and education. Hence, in this thesis, a case study was conducted, which aimed at examining the impacts of new media technologies on interpersonal communication and teacher-student interactions within the scope of EMU. In doing so, the subject matter deeply investigated by focusing on the categories such as teacher-student roles in terms of accessibility, comprehension of information, self-esteem and motivation. Data gathered through an online questionnaire from both the students and faculty members from the following faculties which were the Faculty of Communication, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Business and Economics during the COVID-19 Pandemic. 465 data were obtained from 394 students and 71 faculty members from the aforementioned faculties. SPSS 22 Package program was employed to analyze the data. In this respect, a factor analysis, reliability tests and chi-square tests were performed for all the Likert Scale questions to obtain more comprehensive data. The reliability tests showed that the alpha coefficient value was 0,925, which can be considered as a highly reliable data. The findings indicated that the majority of participants claimed that the use of new media technologies increased interpersonal communication and face-to-face communication through technology, facilitated exchange of feelings, made it easier for people to start communication, eliminated the time and the distance issue in interpersonal communication, facilitated teacher-student interactions, increased accessibility of teachers, removed communication barriers among teachers and students, allowed both parties to communicate in or out of the school settings and helped teachers and students to establish a warm and sincere relationship in their interactions.