HOW SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AFFECT ACADEMIC

PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN COLLEGE.

1.0 Background of Study.

Social media are Internet sites where people interact freely, sharing and discussing
information about each other and their lives, using a multimedia mix of personal words, pictures,
videos and audio. Social network is a platform for people share their ideals, to meet new friends
and to reconnect with old friends. Social networking sites offer people new and varied ways to
communicate via the internet, whether through their PC or their mobile phone. At these Web
sites, individuals and groups create and exchange content and engage in person-to-person
conversations.
They appear in many forms including blogs and microblogs, forums and message boards,
social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, social bookmarking, tagging and news, writing
communities, digital storytelling and scrapbooking, and data, content, image and video sharing,
podcast portals, and collective intelligence.
There are lots of well-known sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest,
Instagram, Snapchat, MySpace, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Wikipedia,
Wetpaint, Wikidot, Second Life, Reddit, Lulu and others.

2.0 Problem Statement.

Affect towards inter-personal skills:Due to overwhelming usage of social media, a person lacks communication in real
life. This leads to lacks of confident, effecting public speaking ability and reality
confrontation.

Individual easily distracted :When a person has already use the social media for a long period of time or a new
user, it will become an addiction. The feeling within themself will urge to check on
the updates will distract them in their current duty, chores or work. It will cause them
to lose focus in what they are doing currently. This will effect on their productivity.

Internet has led to its excessive use:The expansion in technology has also affected internet software, thus leading to
chatting sites known by the name social media. With social networking sites, one
can send and receive messages almost immediately. However, lack of regulation of
the internet has led to its excessive use. It is a common sight to see a youth chatting in
sensitive and highly organized places like church, mosque and lecture venues. Some
are so carried away that even as they are walking along the high way, they keep
chatting.

Effecting skills acquisitions:The manufacturing and distribution of equally sophisticated cellular phones has
complicated the situation, as youths no longer need to visit a cybercaf before they
send and receive messages. Attention has been shifted from visible to invisible
friends, while important ventures like study and writing are affected in the process.
This phenomenon has become a source of worry to many who believe in knowledge
and skill acquisition. The emergence of social media as a result of advancement in
technology and expansion in internet software has raised eye brows among academics
on its (social media) impacts on studies. Students at all levels of learning now have
divided attention to studies, as a result of available opportunities to be harnessed from
social media. Whether these opportunities promote studies is a question that needs to
be answered. There are two side points of effects that shown at below:

Positive Effects

Negative Effects

Ease in
information
access
(Research)
Good medium for
communication
(long distance
communication)
Convenient in research.
(multiple choice of source)

Anti-Social.

Easily
distracted.
Affect inter-personal
skills.
(Man to man
communication)
Disrupt daily routine.
(Time management)

3.0 Objectives
This proposal was carried out with the following objectives:
a) To discover how the student of UTHM are using the social networking sites.
b) To determine what is UTHM student perception on social media as a platform for
educational learning.
c) To recommend the benefits of social media within UTHM students.

4.0 Significance of the Study

Students
Students shall be concerned about the effects of social media to their academic
performance.
Fully make use of social media to gain beneficial information.

Professors/Educators
Know how to utilize social media for educational purpose.
Help students to reduce the contagious of surfing social networks.

Parents
Manage and control their childrens time surfing social networks.
Blocking the unbeneficial network.

Public
Aware of wrong usage of social media.

5.0 Scope and Delimitation.

Malaysian people are exposed to various kinds of social networking sites on the internet and
this study will help how this sites can be improved to be used as a platform for educational
learning for UTHM students. Students exposed to the pros and cons and also as a prevention
from misuse social networking sites. To provide evidence that would solidify the support on

controlling the usage of social networking sites. The main targets for this project are the students
of University Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, who as a primary respondent.

6.0 Definition of Terms

In order to understand clearly the subject matter, we define the following key concepts: social
networking sites, and academic performance, as they are essential to fully comprehend the issue
in focus.
Social networking sites are social network services that focus on building online
communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the
interests and activities of others.
Academic performance refers to how students deal with their studies and how they cope with
or accomplish different tasks given to them by their lecturers.
We define students in our study as student of University Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia
(UTHM). Where the response that we gather are from UTHM students that are staying inside and
outside of the campus.