THE DOWNSIDES OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO DEVELOP CROSS-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING: EFL STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE

As developing Cross-Cultural Understanding (CCU) brings a lot of benefits to cross-cultural communication, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers around the world have started a new trend of promoting CCU through the use of social media. However, despite the advantages people can get from this method, there are also some disadvantages that they should take into account. Therefore, this research tries to discover some negative impacts of using social media in order to develop CCU based on what 21 EFL students in Indonesia have experienced. This research is a case study that employs questionnaires and interviews as the data collection methods. Meanwhile, the data collected were analyzed qualitatively. The research study results in the finding of 6 negative impacts that social media could cause when they were used as a tool to develop CCU. Those negative effects include xenocentrism, exposure to inappropriate and negative contents, language shift, cultural stereotyping, culture shift, and social media addiction.