Impact of Social Media on Women's Empowerment: A Study of Female Graduate Students in a North Indian Town

The usage of social media has tremendously increased in the last decade with the advent of web 2.0 technology, which is characterized by interactivity, user-generated content, and user participation such as social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, podcasting, tagging, user participation, and user-generated content sharing through YouTube and Wikipedia, etc. The social media is a result of the application of this technology. This has a tremendous impact on the communication patterns of the different sections of the society. In Indian society, the advent of smartphones in the second decade of the present century enabled the masses in general and women in particular to interact with the real and virtual world. During the COVID-19 period, the number of smartphones increased among students so that they could attend online classes organized by their schools and colleges during lockdown. Every female student now has a smartphone of her own. They use it not only for education purposes but also for chatting, blogging, uploading videos, and so on. It has an important impact on the social, economic, political, and cultural aspects of their life. The present paper aims to understand the impact of social media on female graduate students in social, economic, political, and cultural aspects of their life in a post-graduate college in Varanasi, India.