THE USES OF FACEBOOK AMONG UNIERSITY STUDENTS_VIỆC SỬ DỤNG FACEBOOK CỦA SINH VIÊN ĐẠI HỌC

Facebook undoubtedly is one of the most popular social networks in the world today. It has a great deal of influences towards the modern society, leading some significant changes to people’s lives in recent years. Students are no exception.Thus, it has caused some effects, both positive and negative, to students._Facebook là một trong những mạng xã hội phổ biến nhất thế giới ngày nay. Nó có những ảnh hưởng to lớn đến xã hội hiện đại, dẫn đến những thay đổi đáng kể đối với cuộc sống con người. Sinh viên cũng không ngoại lệ. Nó gây ra cả ảnh hưởng tích cực và tiêu cực đối với sinh viên.

THE USES OF FACEBOOK AMONG

STUDENTS AT UNIVERSITY

Facebook undoubtedly is one of the most popular social networks in the world today It has a great deal of influences towards the modern society, leading some significant changes to people’s lives in recent years.Students are no exception Facebook has offered

a number of activities and features that students can do and make use of such as exchanging information, chatting with friends, etc Thus, it has caused some effects, both positive and negative, to students Based on data collected from survey carried out within Hanoi University, our team’s aim is to investigate the uses of Facebook among University students as well as its impacts Besides, some recommendations concerned this issue are also mentioned We believe that this report can serve as an useful information about circumstances of Facebook’s usage among students.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………i

LIST OF FIGURES.……… iii

1 Introduction……….1

2 Method………2

3 Results……….2

4 Discussions of findings………4

4.1 The use of Facebook among students……… 4

4.2 Impacts of Facebook on students……… 5

4.2.1 Positive effects……… 6

4.2.2 Negative effects……….6

5 Recommendation……….6

6 Conclusion……… 7

REFERENCES………8

APPENDICES……….9

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Students’ time spent on Facebook per day……… 2

Figure 2: Students’ activities on Facebook……… 3

Figure 3: The positive effects of Facebook……….4

Figure 4: The negative effects of Facebook……… 4

1 Introduction

Facebook is one of the greatest social media in recent times, which involved millions of young people including teenager and adolescent using this popular application As you, one of the miliions users, already know the attractiveness of facebook coming along with its hundreds of incredible cool effects and this awesome app also brings lots of utilities For instance, you can chat with a friend far 1000 kilometres away from you with a connection to internet or maintain your social status by making online friends, joining a groups of people with same habbits and hobbies These convenient and alluring features are the reason why millions of people using this application regularly and take it as a part

of their daily life

Similarly, the students are not an exception Our research will focus mostly on the frequency of the times students spend on facebook and the impact of this trending app on those studying at the department In the last decade, the use of social networking sites has grown exponentially For example, statistics provided by Newsroom (2019) reveal that as

of March 2014 there were 2.38 billion active users on the site per month, and at least 1.56 billion of these users logged into Facebook every day With statistics such as these, it is not surprising that Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world It is also one of the most popular websites on the Internet, third placement on the chart of global usage (Alexa Internet, 2019) As a result of this popularity, social scientists have recently begun to examine aspects of its use (Wilson, Gosling & Graham, 2012) Facebook was originally created by Zuckerberg to help students identify other students Since its creation, its usage has gained momentum particularly among students (Roblyer, McDaniel, etc, 2010, cited in Moghavvemi, 2015) Students used them not only for communication, learning activities but also to socialize

Socialization is part and parcel of the young adult in their daily life In today’s world, one

of the easiest and fastest ways to socialise is using the Facebook Facebook usage has been receiving numerous attentions Some say it brings positive impacts on students’

performance, some say no impact while others say there are negative impacts All of these above researchs have clearly shown how popular facebook is and what the effects are on students, which is mostly demonstrated on our research However, this paper will focus more on the facebook usage intensity and both the positive and negative impact of facebook, and answer three main questions Firstly, how often does a student use facebook?

Secondly, which one do the students suffer from the most, positive or negative effect? And finally, is facebook needed for a better academic performance?

2 Method

The data used in this report is acquired from a survey carried out within Hanoi University In the first place, 100 students from English Department were randomly selected in order to fill in the questionaires A total of 10 questions were catagorized into

2 main groups The first half of quesionaire were designed to analyze the use of social network Facebook among students The other questions were organized to get a detailed information about the positive and negative effects of Facebook to students These questions also helped to evaluate students’s awareness about such affects The main purpose of this survey is to have a further investigation into students’s use of Facebook as well as the impacts of it to students, especially their academic life

3 Results

This survey was conducted through the cooperation of 50 students Thanks to this, the acquired results have clearly shown the uses of Facebook among students According to the figures from questionaire, all of 50 students in this survey answered that they currently have a Facebook account

Figure 1: Students’ time spent on Facebook per day

As can be seen from Figure 1, a huge number of students (58%) spent from 1 to 5 hours using Facebook while a small proportion of students only took more than 10 hours to access it In addtion, 24 % reported that they use Facebook less than 1 hour, which is as twice as the number of students spending from 5 to 10 hours on this social network

Figure 2: Students’ activities on Facebook

Turning activities on Facebook, the main things students usually do were entertainment and communication (74% and 76% respectively) The next place are news & information (58%), education (38%) and networking (34%) Business, however, was the activity that the proportion of students taking part in was quite low (20%) With regard to student’ interest, a large number of students (84%) chose Messenger as a feature of

Facebook that they like while, other than common features like News Feed (48%), photos (34%) and timeline (10%), there were a few students (4%) having an interest in video and story

Figure 3: The positive effects of Facebook

As can be seen in the chart, communication leads the trend with 39 out of 50 (78 %) votes, following up close is 36 votes (72%) from entertainment purpose Taking the third place with 29 votes counted (58%) is people’s intention of using Facebook for finding information, which nearly double the figure of education Similarly, the proportion of business (18%) is halved the number of emotion (2%), as the former took the 4th placement on the list

Figure 4: The negative effects of Facebook

Addiction is the most common negative impact that affects students using Facebook as its number rivals to the top (26 votes, 52%) Altogether, insecurity and privacy invasion share the same number of 23 votes (46%) as well as the figure of cyberbullying and relationship damaging Finally, there are few who has not had any bad effects when using this application

When it comes to questions about effects, there are nearly half of them (44%) answer that Facebook makes their academic performance better while 38% say the opposite The others still do not have any idea about this

4 Discussions of findings

4.1 The use of Facebook among students

From the resullts presented above, it is not a surprise that all of 50 students quesioned says that they own a Facebook account Although the figures are just taken from a limited number of students and cannot cover all students, it is no doubt that Facebook is one of the most popular social networks in the perspectives of many students This is understandable as Facebook has always triumphed over all other social networks with over 500 million active users every month (Bedassa, 2014) It draws the attention from a

wide range of all kinds of people, especially university students Thus, it is very reasonable if there are a large number of students using Facebook

From the results as shown in Figure 1, it can be easily seen that most student spend a huge amount of time on Facebook This result is totally within expectation when it comes

to current trends This generation has grown up along withs the rise of a specific social network called Facebook Although Facebook is not the only social platform at that time,

it has satisfied most users’ hearts thanks to the build of many utilities To our expectation, these utilities has somewhat fitted with the acquired results of students’ activities and features they like on Facebook

The common reason for Facebook’s popular use is its ability to keep in touch with each other In the globalization age, communication between people becomes more than necessary Facebook can provide the users easy and convenient way of communication with a variety of features attached with like emoticons, file-sharing, etc It gives people power of communication in their palms of hands as they just pick up some devices and then go to Facebook application or website without having to meet face-to-face (Boukouvidis, 2015) Another reasons for this are due to social capital and social grooming needs (Wilson, Gosling&Graham, 2012) In other words, it is a basic desire to maintain social relationships even if it is just in virtual network such as Facebook (Wilson, Gosling & Graham, 2012)

In terms of information, entertainment and networking, Facebook certainly has achieved these Whatever it is global, national or local issues, it contains a vast information in many fields while it can provide users with some type of entertainments like memes, games and some other applications (Boukouvidis, 2015) Facebook is the site where students can both find free information and communicate with other people so it helps education more easier The information-sharing in many forms like documents , photos, pictures has enhanced students’s interaction and information exchange via Facebook Turning to business issues, although Facebook contains a large amount of information about it, university students can only take part-time jobs at most so it is understandable for the reasons this activity is quite low

4.2 Impacts of Facebook on students

4.2.1 Positive effects

Why do so many youngsters use all of their hours checking Facebook and what are the good benefits that this application provide? There are many reasons behind the scene, but

it all start with Facebook’s features What make Facebook so popular mostly because of its attractive functions such as newfeed, messenger, posting, comment section and many services which meets the requirements of the user So, what benefits do users (we will focus mainly on students) gain from using Facebook? Looking at the Figure 3, we can see that most of the student avail Facebook for communication purpose It is a great way to keep in touch with your family and friends that live far away With instant messaging and even video chat, Facebook is the perfect place to stay connected With the status updates, photos, and profile information, it can keep you up to date on the happenings of all of your close ones Facebook is also a great place for entertainment, as many students said they were using it for watching memes, funny videos or maybe for laughing at somebody’s love got rejection Generally, using Facebook could help you reduce stress, anxiety and other psychological diseases if you put it in a good use

4.2.2 Negative effects

Facebook is great for communication, networking and planning events It is a social media platform that was designed to connect people and clearly it achieves this in a number of ways However, as we have listed out on the result we found, the negative impacts are more and worse than the opposite one First on the list is addiction There is a symptom called Facebook Addiction Disorders (FAD), and many students in our department has fallen upon its sleeve, as they get addicted unconsciously A large number

of interviewers affirmed that they got hooked up to Facebook and, consequently, affected their academic performance Privacy is a great concern when Facebook has become the most popular social networking site among young users, and many people are relying on this app for many purposes, which is easier for intruder to crawl over your “wall” to get information about your personal life

What’s more, cyberbullying is a common issue which appears within students because they can use the popularity and how fast and spread-out news can travel from one person

to others to blackmail for their own profit If students allow these bad effects to involve into their daily lives, Facebook is dangerous and unneeded in improving academic performance

5 Recommendation

There are many ways to deal with negative impacts, but the most important way is to change your behavior You could reduce the time you checked your status, messaged to your friend, spent hours of your free time on newfeed, however, reality is often disappointing Many people have tried to stay away from Facebook for a long time, yet, after a short while, they started returning to use it again The lacking ingredients in this recipe are people short of determination and courage They have ideas, plans which is detailed from A to Z, and they even swear for success, and after a couple of months, you see them failed miserably

Learning from this, students should set their goals and sensible timetables to achieve those targets They should also must be determined on what they need to do, focusing more and must not lose your will to achieve greatness According to Health and Wellness Services (2019), they should set their limitation time from twenty to thirty minutes away from Facebook and turn on “do not disturb” feature By doing this, students will have more time to achieve better academic performance and enjoy many things outside of the digital screen

6 Conclusion

In conclusion, we have seen that many students still did not have a slightest idea about how they use Facebook and what the effects are when using it, which this paper would make them understand more about it and help them handle the problems more effectively

We have mainly discussed on the frequency of hours students spend their time on Facebook and the activities which mostly use by undergraduate when they visit the site Moreover, we have found many impacts, both good and bad, on academic performance and made some suggestions for negative ones We hope that this research will be seen as