The Boon and Bane of Social Networking Among Students

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Nowadays the youth are in Information Technology(IT) phenomenon where everything is just at the tip of their fingers. Internet has become a integral for the communities. Besides searching for information, students are also occupied with social networking. The examples of social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Social networking have plenty of advantages as well as the disadvantages for students. The advantages of social networking among students are flexible time to discuss with friends, make friends with different background and gain fast information, while the disadvantages of it are lost focus, waste of time and receive false information.

Since the internet is 24 hours available, there is the flexibility of time where students can access it whenever they want. Sometimes students would prefer to start their work at late night and having all sorts of questions or formula that they do not know. By connecting to their social network, students can interact with friends and may have discussion about the problems. According to spotlight.mcfound.org, A small but impressive study of students at Lockhaven University in Pennsylvania found that those who used Twitter to continue class discussions and complete assignments were more engaged in their classwork than students who did not, (cited in clintlalonde.net, 2011).

            The next advantage of social networking is student can make new friends with people who has  different background. Academic learning can be more interesting if there are more point of view about it. A student can make new friends which are from other culture, religion, race and can ask their opinion for a certain subject such as a discussion for essay content-cultures. Here student can have a realistic information about the particular culture, religion and race. Most of the times, when people search for information through the internet they always take the unrealistic information because of no information filtering. Online materials are overflowing and therefore, it is hard for students to find the accurate answer for their question.

            Gaining fast information is also an advantage from social networking among students. Everything are fast widespread via Facebook and Twitter. Any news and latest information can be gain from that site as soon as a person look into it. Students sometimes does not have to search and do information filtering to have the information that they want. Students may click on a trusted person social network site to get the related facts. This is very convenience and avoid wasting much of the student time to search for academic materials.

            Despite all the advantages of social networking among students, there are a few of social networking disadvantages. The first flaw of it is looses focus from the real intention of study purpose. Students have set the mind to log in the Facebook and just discuss or asking friends about academic problems, but they usually will distray from it when seeing the feeds beside. There were a survey about students and Facebook. According to fellow student Sarah,18, most of her peers could multi-task well, but using sites like Facebook was a question of balance,(cited in Herald Sun, www.heraldsun.com).This proved that social networking can distract students because of their features or applications. Actually, social networking will get students addicted to it.

            Students interacting with other student in the social network, can be a waste of time. Communicating by online let the other person have the freedom to reply whenever he or she wants to. This leads to the procrastination of time when person A is waiting for a long period for person B to reply. Students waste most of their time in front of the computers, just waiting for a simple answer as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This is frustrating and will also put the student in a stressful situation. Many things can be done from the time that has been wasted for waiting too long for a reply. Their homework may also delayed due to depending too much on friends instead of searching materials for themselves.

            Another disadvantage of social networking among students is prone to receive false information. People can post anything they want in Facebook and Twitter. The validity is not confirmed and even some of the irresponsible individual just create some random information from the thin air. Students who are immature will probably take the information without thinking further. The consequences of this problem make the students using the wrong information in their homeworks.

            In a nutshell, it can be concluded that social networking can bring a positive and negative impact among the students. It will be an advantage if the students use the social network wisely and not excessively. Students should aware the priority of their work and must not be distracted by the useless act such as following vain posts and leaving behind meaningless comment or reply. It could be a disadvantages if the students are social networking without a clear goal to achieve.

tolonglh btulkan apa2 je yg slah dlm ni.