Social Networking sites are currently the most popular online activity. With the number of users on Facebook surpassing 500 million the impact of social networking sites on society is beginning to attract many people’s attention. As a college student at the University of California – Berkeley it is not hard ponder the negative effects that social networking sites like Facebook might have on student performance.
Every week undergraduates spend multiple hours on Facebook, from updating their status to posting a funny picture they took from last night. But how do they find the time on top of the growing responsibilities of college. Well, the truth is they don’t. Instead of studying for an up and coming exam or completing their necessary readings, many students become entranced by the continuously updating News Feed as well as by the many other features Facebook has to offer. It is not uncommon to be in a large class lecture and see ten or so people in front of you on their laptops looking at their Facebook profiles; it can be quite distracting sometimes.
This ‘addiction’ has forced some to put limits on their Facebook usage. It is amazing what students will do in order to prevent themselves from going on time draining websites like Facebook. A roommate of mine recently downloaded an app called Self Control. This Mac application allows the user to choose his or her own distracting websites and set a given amount of time, up to one day, for the sites to be blocked. Besides other programs similar to the Self Control app, social network users have also deactivated their accounts or had a friend change their password just to avoid the increasing temptations of Facebook. But to what extent do these methods actually prevent the user from accessing Facebook? The Self Control app may prevent you my logging on via a computer, but in today’s technological world it is not uncommon for a student to have a phone with access to the web. Not only have students felt the immediate effects of Facebook, but many companies have also seen productivity go down as a result of employees spending time on networking sites. In the United Kingdom, an employment website polled a group of employees and found that 6% spent more than an hour on social networking sites every day. Now at first I thought that this was an insignificant amount, but according to MyJobGroup.co.uk this small fraction accounts for more than 22 billion dollars’ worth in lost time. Many businesses have taken an approach to prevent employees from misusing their time by restricting time allowed on Facebook or completely blocking it.
This business approach brings up the question of whether universities will limit student access to particular sites in the future. At UC-Berkeley, all dorm residents already have restrictions on total bandwidth, limiting the amount of data uploaded or downloaded from the internet. Cal’s internet usage limitation is mostly related to campus funding, but it is not too far to say that one day colleges may enact rules to prohibit excessive use of Facebook and other networking sites to improve student performance.
