IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON STUDENT’S ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Technology in communication no doubt has turned the entire world into a "Global Village", but as it is, technology has its own positive and negative sides. Technology exposes humans to a better way of doing things. It helps people to be better informed, enlightened and keeping abreast with world developments.

         Social media has exploded as a category of online discourse where people create content, share it, bookmark it and network at an economic rate.

         Social media is defined as "technologies that made social communication easy and enable discussions among its participants". Social media could also mean a web-based mobile application that allows people or companies to make, interact with, and share new user-generated or current material, in digital environment. In the last ten years, the online world has changed dramatically, thanks to the invention of social media, young men and women now exchange ideas, feelings, personal information, pictures and videos at a truly astonishing rate. Students are consumers and producers of media.

Thanks to the Internet and social web including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, smartphone and text messaging, most students increasingly live in a world where information is access to communication technologies.

Social networking websites provides tools by which people can communicate, share information, and create new relationships. With the popularity of social networking websites on the rise, our social interaction is affected in multiple ways as we adapt to our increasingly technological world. The way web users interact and talk to each other has changed and continues to change. These users now socialize through the Internet and it takes way from the person socialization that has been around forever. Social networking websites have affected our social interaction by changing the way we interact face-to-face, how we receive information, and the dynamics of our social groups and friendships (Asur and Huberman, 2010).

Early 1990s, chat rooms and bulletin boards were forms of social networking in a way, the help people to connect with others and share interest. Communication allows people to connect with people they had known in high school and colleges and enables them to meet others.

In the early 20s, a site called Friendster was set up where people invited their friends and their friends also invited others. The sire was popular for a while, but suffered from technical difficulties and fake profiles and began to lose members. In 1999, My Space took over bit became popular in 2003. Its root are a bit muddy because it received financial and logistical support from another company called the E-Universe and most of the early users were employers of e-universe but Tom Anderson and Chris DE Wolfe are given credit for much of the innovation and success of the site, which built up to one hundred and fifteen million users worldwide. Members post BIOS, photos, blogs, videos and other things that strike their fancy.

Some television programmers had started producing programmer's to air on MySpace in 2005, Rupert Mudodis News Corporation (part of Fox broadcasting) brought MySpace for five hundred and eighty million dollars ($580). A competitor of MySpace is Facebook which started about 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg whole he was a student at Harvard and grew rapidly in 2007. At first, Facebook was solely for college and high school students but Mark opened it to everyone and like MySpace, it encourages all types of members postings. There are also smaller social networks like YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Imo, Blackberry chat for people to have access to.

WhatsApp messenger is a freeware, cross-platform and end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application for smartphones. It uses the Internet to make voice calls, one to one video calls, see d text messages, images, videos, documents, user locations, audio files, phone contacts and voice notes to other users using standard cellular mobile numbers. It also incorporates a feature called Status, which allows users to upload photos and videos to a 24-hours-lifetime feed that, by default, are visible to all contacts; similar to Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram stories.

Instagram let's register users, upload photos or videos to the service. User cab apply various digital filters to their images, and add location through geotags. They can add hash tags to their posts, linking the photos up to other content on Instagram featuring the same subject or overall topic. Users can connect their Instagram account to other social media profiles, enabling them to share photos to those profiles as well. Originally, a distinctive feature of Instagram was its confining of photos to a square

1.2 Statement of the Problem

Student's academic performance is affected by a large number of factors but the impact of social media on the performance of students is most important than any other factor. Since the advent of social media sites in the 1990s, it is assumed in some quarters that the academic performance of students is facing a lot of neglect and challenges. There is a deviation, distraction and divided attention between social networking activities and their academic work. It is observed that students devote more attention to social media than they do to their studies.

1.3 Objectives of the Study

The objectives of the study are:

1. To examine the impact of social media on the academic performance of students of Olabisi Onabanjo University.

2. To find out how often OOU students go online.

3. To find out which various social networking sites the students had access to.

4. To ascertain what students use the social media for.

1.4 Research Questions

1. What is the impact of social media on the academic performance of students in Olabisi Onabanjo University?

2. How often do OOU students go online?

3. What social networking sites do the students had access to?

4. What do the students use the social media for?

1.5 Significance of the Study

     The essence of this research work is to primarily study the influence of social media on the academic performance of students. This research tends to focus on students of Olabisi Onabanjo University for easy analysis of data. It is relevant in assisting students in understanding the diversity of social media.

1.6 Scope of the Study

This study will be restricted to the impact of social media on student academic performance. The study is restricted to the five Faculties in OOU permanent site (PS). The Faculties are; Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social and Management Sciences, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Science.

1.7  Operational Definition of Terms

The following are key terms used in the research work;

Social Media- they are forms of electronic communication which facilitate interactive base on certain interest. Social media include Web and mobile technology.

Social Networking Sites- A website where people put information about them and can send to others.

Social Networking: The use of the internet to make information about yourself available to other people especially people you share an interest with to send messages to them.

Academic: It is concerned with studying from books as opposed to practical work.

Students: someone who is studying at a university or school. Someone who is very interested in a particular subject.

Computer: A computer is a machine that receives or stores or processes data quickly according to a stored program.

O.O.U: Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria.