CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are the latest online communication tools that allow users to create a public or private profile to interact in real time with other people in their networks (Boyd & Ellison, 2008). The Facebook (FB) website was created by Mark Zuckerberg with the aim of helping residential college and university students to identify fellow students in other halls of residence.. It is described as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges and universities” (Zuckerberg, 2005, p. 1). MySpace and the more popular FB have millions of registered users, with FB being the overwhelmingly more popular SNS (Gavin, 2009; Gonzalez, 2009, check facebook.com). Research has proved the overridingly immense impact of technology on academic achievement and development of children and teenagers. Both positive and negative effects of technology on students’ achievements’ have been documented (Espinosa et al, 2006). He investigated the role of technology in early childhood development using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Findings showed that access to internet had contributed to the learning potential of the students. The authors cautioned parents to encourage educational use of technology to improve academic achievement. Studies on the specifics of access and acknowledge that quantity is not as important as quality when it comes to technology use and student achievement (Lei and Zhao, 2005). Specifically, when the quality of technology use is not closely monitored or controlled, computer use may do more harm than good to student achievement in school. In addition, technology that was found to have a positive impact on academic achievement, or technology with educational value, was not popular with students and they used it less frequently (Espinosa et al, 2006). It has also been documented that there is no relationship between computer use and academic achievement. For example, no relationship was established between time spent on the computer at home and (GPA) in a sample of adolescents (Hunley, Evans, Delgado-Hachey, Krise, Rich, & Schell, 2005). Other studies found out that recreational Internet use is strongly correlated with impaired academic performance (Kubey, Lavin, & Barrows, 2001). Approximately 10-15% of study participants reported a feeling of not being in complete control of their Internet use and that it hurt their schoolwork. Students who reported Internet-caused schoolwork problems were found to have spent five times (x5) more hours online than those who did not, and they were significantly more likely to report that their Internet use caused them to stay up late, get less sleep and miss classes (Kirschner, 2009). Although not specifically mentioning FB, the authors conclude that it is not so much the Internet that causes these problems as the new social opportunities of the Internet (Kirschner, 2009). Students who reported academic problems were more likely to use the Internet for real-time social activities such as chat rooms. Kubey et al (2001) noted that these social uses are what hold students captive, especially late at night. According to Vanden Boogart (2006), in an unpublished Master’s thesis, he found out that heavy FB use (i.e., more time spent on FB) is observed among students with lower GPAs, although no control variables were implemented in the analyses. There was no correlation between Facebook use and GPA in a sample of students from a public Northeast Research University (Kolek & Saunders, 2008). However, more recently, an exploratory survey study reported a negative relationship between FB use and academic achievement as measured by selfreported GPA and hours spent studying per week (Karpinski & Duberstein, 2009).

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