Research Topic:

“An assessment of impact of social media on university students in

Faisalabad”

Assigned by:
Dr. Hammad Badar Sb.

Presented by:

Muhammad Humal Qamar 2016-ag-1382

Nabeel Fayyaz 2016-ag-2707
Muhammad Faisal Razzaq 2016-ag-2652
Muhammad Salman 2016-ag-0000
Introduction:

Nowadays, the most commonly used method of communication is social media networking. It
is being used by individuals belonging to every walk of life. There are numerous online
networking platforms that include but are not limited to Facebook, twitter, Instagram, pin
interest, YouTube, LinkedIn, google+, flicker, snapchat, vine, Tumblr. Figure below shows
numerous social media networking types. The main purpose of social media is to give access and
client users. They can have conversation with individuals and construct social relations on the
web. They can likewise share their contemplations and individual data on social media including
everyday happenings, suppositions, pictures, recordings and web-links. Also individuals can
promote their business and individual aptitudes. The capacity of online networking to spread valuable
data quickly has made it the quickest developing method of association. Social networking is very helpful
for the business as well as for the students. With such a high rate of students using social media
networking on daily basis, there is a strong need to analyze the extent to which social media is having its
impact on students. Through the help of social media people can interact with each other very easily also
increase the social relationship. Now a day’s organizations promote their business through online
networking with impactful advertisement. In recent times, social media has a lot of ability to improve
efficiency of the organization through different marketing tactics and also helpful for the Students. As
more people started using social media websites, it became vital role for different business brands to list
their social media addresses that mostly include Facebook and twitter web-links. Hence, social media
became a spot for business as well. Ref Abdulwahaab Alsaif (St20047199)
Academic and co-curricular engagement are powerful forces in both student
psychosocial development and academic success. Improvement in grades and persistence has been noted
across a variety of populations, including minority students, first generation students, and students who
are not adequately prepared for college academic work with increased engagement Ref; (Pascarella &
Terenzini 2005; Kuh et al. 2008). Institutions can create programs that help increase student
engagement, and thereby increase the chances that students will reach the desired outcomes of a college
education (Kuh 2009).
Around 100 million individuals began to use internet and thus social networking websites, by the start of
2000. It turned out to be common for individuals to be engaged on social media websites. Obviously, then
it was through to be odd. Still, more individuals started to use visit these websites for socializing, dating
and educational purpose.
 The invention of smart phone has increased the usage of social media. It enables user to access multiple
social networking sites through just few clicks these social medias has a great impact on students on
which large number of researchers has been conducted and each result show unique result. Social media
also have a positive or negative effect on the university students.
The use of social media among students has reached high levels and has affected their study time, poor
grammar and wrong spellings when socializing on social media as well as diverting their attention from
their studies. Students spends much of their study time on social networks than in their academic
undertaking and it has affected their Grade Point Average (GPA).Fifty years ago, no one knew a term of
“Social Media”. But now, everyone knows about it. This term has become a common knowledge in
society especially for youngsters. It is a new entertainment where people can share and exchange their
thought, personal information, photos and interest. This media is growing bigger every day. In 1978, the
first social media was created. Bulletin Board System (BBS) was created by Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess used to announce meeting and sharing information by posting it on BBS. It
was the beginning of virtual community and the first dial-up in history.

 1995 was a year for personal website. After internet (WWW) launched and loved by many
people, Geocities were launched by Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). Geocities’ service was web
hosting. It allowed internet users to create simple websites for themselves. Early social media
service that appeared in 1997 was six degrees. Six degrees let its users to create profile and
list of friends. It was used by 1 million users. 1999 was a year for Blogger and Live journal.
Users could write, share and communicate with friends by using their own blog or journal.
Friendster was launched in 2002. It could be include in social networking group. It let users to
create profile and virtual connection with people around the world. Now, Friendster has
become a social media for games. Myspace, LinkedIn and WordPress launched in the same year,
2003. Most of Myspace users were musician and band. WordPress was created to be used as open-
source content management system. And LinkedIn was social networking for business-oriented. In
2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘The Facebook’. In the beginning, The Facebook was created as social
networking for college students. YouTube was launched in 2005. It was founded by Jawed Karim, Steve
Chen and Chad Hurley. They were employees of PayPal. It was a social sharing that let users freely
upload and share a video. Twitter was launched in 2006. It was known as social networking and
microblogging site. It let its member to share and exchange 140 character messages. This short message
was called as Tweets. In 2011, Google launched new product of social networking named Google plus
(Google+). Google plus let you have a video chat (hangout) and exchange information. In 2012, the first
social scrapbooking that gained 10 million users faster in history launched. This social scrapbooking’s
name is Pinterest. In Pinterest, you could create and share album of photos.
 So we want to assess the overall impacts of the use of
social media on university students either they are positive or negative. To explore how they are
affecting the academic performance, health and psychology of the students. And to observe the
misunderstandings of the people about the use of social media that it’s not only for some heinous
activities it can be used optimistically as well. At the end, we want to provide some solutions too that
how the university students can use social media affectively for the best productive objectives.

Problem Statement:

In that statement, determine the social media’s impact on the university and college students.
With the explosive growth in the number and use of social media in everyday communication
method for individuals and organizations, there has been a corresponding increase of its
incorporation in teaching and learning in higher institution. In view of this, this study examine
and assess the impact social media has on teaching and learning in higher education. be it
positive or negative impacts. Ref; (Raymond Owusu Boateng α & Afua Amankwaa)

Research Objective:

1) To determine the impact of using social media on university students.

2) To identify the problem of individuals in using social media.
3) Suggestion and measures of social media.

Literature Review:

“Social media” is defined as the function that allows users to interact with each other ,create, edit and
share new forms of content a . So social media denotes to the wide collection of Internet based and
mobile services that connect people together to communicate, participate, collaboratively interact, discuss
and exchange ideas and information on an online community. The kind of Internet services commonly
linked with social media , includes,
Weblogs or blogs, as they are branded, are easily created and updateable websites that allow authors to
publish to the Internet instantly, hence allowing instructors and students to communicate easily. Basically
a blog is an online journal in which pages are usually displayed in reverse in an order. Blogs can be
hosted for free on websites such as Word Press, Tumblr and Blogger.
And “wiki” is a collective website where any participant is allowed to modify any page or create a new
page using Web browser” . Anyone can add and edit what has already been published. One well known
example is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that makes use of wiki technology.
Social Bookmarking sites allow users to organize and share links to websites. This enables users to
produce a searchable personalized internet.Social network sites like Boyd and Ellison (2007) defined
social network sites as public web-based services that allows users to develop a personal profile, identify
other users with whom they have a connection, read and react to postings made by other users on the site,
send and receive messages either privately or publicly. These web based services allow individuals to
construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system. Among the most popular are Facebook
and LinkedIn.
Status update services are also known as micro blogging services, status update services such as Twitter
allow people to share short updates about people or events and to see updates tweeted by others which
allows people to know that what is happening around them in mere seconds.
According to “Douglas Thomas and John Seely Browns” (2011) description of a technology enhanced
new culture of Learning that says, learning is based around principles of collective exploration, play and
innovation rather than individualized instruction, it could be argued that social media supports the aspect
of knowledge consumption and construction that are very different to the conservative principle of formal
education and individual instruction as well as sounding with currently fashionable constructivist and
socio cultural learning theories. These ideas are reflected most explicitly in the notion of connectivism the
idea that learning in a social media age now rests upon the ability to access and use distributed
information on a “just in time basis”. Simply put, learning can be seen as an individual ability to connect
to specialized information sources as and when required. Thus knowledge ability would demand nurturing
and maintenance of these connections. As George Siemens (2004) puts it, learning can therefore be
conceived in terms of the ‘capacity to know more’ via social media rather than a depending on the
individual accumulation of prior knowledge in terms of what is currently known.
And if we talk about impact of Social Media on Students Academic life It provides mechanism for a
familiar exercise. It provides students a direct medium by which to publicly evaluate and comment on
their campus environments, institutional policies, classes, and administration and fellow students in real-
time. Social media moves through our campuses nearly unseen, dragging behind it the heavy weight of
social injustices and complicated Jurisprudence gathered from decades of student speech (Gurcan 2015).
Given social media’s potential for positive impact, and in many ways the technology is already out of our
grasp.
And now a days, students communicate with the help of technology, and that If you say absolutely no
Facebook or texting, you are minimizing an important relationship with students technology as an online
teacher use of technology via the use of a variety of tools such as Skype, text, email, Facebook and
twitter. Social media opens up new ways for collaboration and discussion in the sense that, it offers a
good deal of material posting, coping, sharing and search ability by easily using online search tools.
Students today use social media anywhere and at any time where internet connection is available in order
to meet their educational needs.
On the other hand, the numbers of complaints of inappropriate contact involving social media, the
possible threats are too great. Student engaging in a private relationship outside the classroom circles begs
for inappropriate behavior to happen (Gurman 2015). There is the likelihood of users not being courteous
and respectful of other , vulgarity, or language that is harassing, or otherwise inappropriate for the
university environment sometimes circulates in these platforms. Users can easily display, send, retrieve,
or download any items that are negative, or contain hate-based or discriminatory material without the
notification of a teacher, university management . This in return can make students agree that they have
no right or expectation of privacy with respect to their use of university technology (Gurman 2015).

So there are always chances for the things to happen wrong and that is true about technology as well. That
is why ,critics would have to stop talking about only the nagtive impacts of using social media . They
must realize that there are huge good opportunities associated with social media too that can groom
students if used properly.