The impact of social networking technology on students

Abstract: Social networking includes social networking sites (SNSs) as well as apps. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the impact of social networking tech-nology on students.  The  research questions  focused  how university students experience  their  interaction  with  social  networking  regarding  advantages and disadvantages, and for what purposes they are using it personal, professional or study). A quantitative surveys study was used and data was collected through online questionnaires delivered via SNSs, e-mails and through delivery and col-lection  method. 122  valid  responses  were collected  and 17 invalid responses were discarded. The questionnaire framework was built by means of the con-cept of ease of use from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the five values of Uses and Gratification Theory; “purposive value”, “self-discovery”, “maintaining interpersonal interconnectivity”, “social enhancement value” and “entertainment value”. The findings showed that 64% considered themselves to be positively influenced by SNSs and 27% to be neither positively or nega-tively influenced. Only 11 % considered that SNSs influenced them negatively. According to our findings, some of the most frequent advantages are keeping in touch with family and friends, cost and time efficient, easy to use and entertaining. And for the disadvantages, the responses were mostly time consuming, health  issues,  privacy  issues,  addiction  to  technology  and  cyber  bulling.  The majority of respondents reported using SNS firstly for personal use, secondly for study use and the professional use was the least selected. 88% of the respondents thought that it is easy to use SNSs. The purposive value of SNS use was to get information, the self-discovery value to learning about oneself and others, for the maintaining interpersonal connectivity, to stay in touch, and for the entertainment value, it was to pass time away when bored. The results indicated  that  the  social  enhancement  value  was  not  very  important  for  the  respondents.