Let’s look at the student progress in High school for a while; a Global Secure System performed a survey on 500 English school children between the age of 13 and 17. The result of this survey shows that 51% of student confirmed to being on SNS to check their profiles during lessons and over a quarter declare that they spend more than 30 minutes on SNS each day at school. All these result shows that teens are very serious about social networking. For them failing to attend to these duties could end friendships and go down their reputations.
On the University level the use of SNS are same as in other educational areas. But I have noticed that after being encouraged and directed by their professors student have made good use of these resources. A lecturer at John Cabot University in Rome reveal that he encourage the students to be creative, to promote their which just over a year from launch is pulling in progressively rising traffic. No doubt all the blog, Facebook and MySpace mentions are helping. He had students who use social networking sites to build and promote projects on , organising music gigs art and photo exhibitions plus arrange meet ups for political rallies.
An assistant professor of Telecommunication Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University believe that SNS have made us better off as a society and individuals. By the passage of time we will see increase in SNS utility as more population will adopt it. Political activities organized via Facebook, Job found through LinkedIn and growing amount of academic research on SNS are the evidence of positive outcomes of this technology.
During the last three years a research has been carried out by a team at the Michigan State university to find out why individuals would voluntarily use a site that based on media reports, offer only a way to disclose information they should not reveal, collect hundreds of friends they did not know and waste time which can be spent on studies. In this research they done a survey to understand the benefit individuals receive from their relationships with other on SNS. They found that individuals are able to receive information and ideas from the people they don’t know very well. They are using Facebook to increase the size of their social network and therefore their access to more information and various perspectives.
To observe SNS from psychological point I want to state the views of a psychology professor William Reader at Sheffield Hallam University. He thinks it is difficult to say with any degree of assurance that SNS influence in a good way or bad way. He believe that SNS may help to make friends without engaging in face to face contact with people but face to face contact are very important. Shared attitudes are important for friendship. We know that people like to join together with people who are like them. The more similar we are to our friends the less room there is for argument on interest. In his opinions SNS will never replace face to face communication in the development of close friendships. Anyone can post “you are cool” on the Facebook but genuine smiles and laughs are a much more dependable signs of someone’s suitability as a trustworthy friend.
We can realize that many people on SNS are meeting with other people before they meet each other face to face. As a result of this when many students begin university; they find themselves with a group of readymade associates. Given people’s liking for people who are like them growing the development of homogeneous friendship networks. In a way this cannot be considered as a good situation, choosing potential friends via Facebook profiles, it mean that people cut themselves off from unexpected encounters with those who are apparently different from them, ethnically, socio-economically and even in term of musical taste.
A former Apple marketing director and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Steve Chazin believe that this technology has changed our lives for the better, but at a cost. It provides great benefits but also the way we use to live are changing and everybody cannot happily adopt these changes. In their opinions tools provided by SNS have improved the quality of people’s lives and made it nearly effortless for us to keep in touch with friends, family, colleagues and also have increased the chances to make new friends and create a community.
The negatives are that all the sharing of information can lead to some harmful situations like recruiters can assess young professional’s profiles which are applying for jobs by hacking into their SNS accounts and make decision on based of the accessed information. As well as becoming computer addicted and committing suicide can also become a matter due to the SNS.
Now having researched into social networking my views are still the same as I originally thought but now I have more knowledge, a better understanding of social networking and why people do it. Also I realize that negative impact of SNS can be reduced by encouraging and directing the users in positive way e.g. education, advertising etc...Also I was immensely delighted to discover individual’s views regarding the future which they believe we can interact with others on the Web, by having truly immersive face to face video conversations and experience a fusion of our real and cyber worlds where second life becomes second nature.
