Social networks: Pardon impossible to be executed

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Every day you can hear from your friends and relatives that young adults are becoming obsessed more and more with twitting, chatting, posting and liking. Hours that could be used for study are gone. But is the reality the same? If social networks disappeared, would it increase students’ academic performance? Where would you put a comma in the title of this post in relation to the social networks?

It is not a secret that number of social network sites (SNS) has increased dramatically within the last years. Its penetration is impressive – according to statistics, about quarter of the world’s population use social networks. Taking into account that majority of them are young adults, there is a raising concern about the impact of SNS on students’ study.

There were several studies conducted to explore how the use of SNS influences students’ academic performance. Interestingly, but results were different. Some researchers found a strong negative correlation between SNS use and students’ GPA (Kubey, Lavin, & Barrows, 2001; Karpinski & Duberstein, 2009; Karpinski, Kirschner, Ozer, Mellot, & Ochwo, 2013), while others stated that SNS do not impact on students’ study in neither positive nor negative way (Kolek & Saunders, 2008; Pasek, More, & Hargittai, 2009).

To find the real impact of SNS on students study, I decided to conduct an experiment – I found ten students who agreed to spend one week without social networks. For this, their passwords were changed so that the half was typed by me and another half by the participant. In this way none of us could login without each other.

I would like to share the main finding that I found as the most interesting: all participants thought that SNS affect their study negatively and they will spend more time for studying, but none of them actually studied more. They explained it as follows: “It is not about SNS, but personal attitude. If I don’t want to study, I will always find what to do and how to procrastinate”. I was also glad to hear that one week without SNS has changed their attitude towards SNS. Although my analysis is not ready yet, I realized two main outputs from this experiment. First, expectations and reality differ a lot. Second, SNS is just a “tool” for procrastination which would be happening anyway.

What do you think about SNS?

 P.S.: this is not directly connected to the topic discussed above, but several weeks ago a world-famous singer Stromae had released a new video called Carmen. You definitely should watch it as it will force you to think about the impact of SNS on our lives in general.

References

Karpinski, A. C.,  Duberstein, A. (2009). A description of Facebook use and academic performance among undergraduate and graduate students. In Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA (pp. 5-10).

Karpinski, A. C., Kirschner, P. A., Ozer, I., Mellott, J. A., & Ochwo, P. (2013). An exploration of social networking site use, multitasking, and academic performance among United States and European university students.Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 1182-1192.

Kolek, E. A., & Saunders, D. (2008). Online disclosure: An empirical examination of undergraduate Facebook profiles. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 45(1), 1-25.

Kubey, R. W., Lavin, M. J., & Barrows, J. R. (2001). Internet use and collegiate academic performance decrements: Early findings. Journal of communication,51(2), 366-382.

Pasek, J., & Hargittai, E. (2009). Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data. First Monday, 14(5).