Effect of Social Networking on Higher Education in India

Abstract

Several studies have been carried out to research the impact of social networking on society. In this work, we aim to study both the positive and negative aspects in which social-networking is affecting our lives. In this paper, we formulate a research questionnaire comprising several questions to evaluate the mindset of the respondents towards the use and impact of social networks. The questions basically try to gain information about age, gender, educational qualification of the respondents and then assess their social networking usage patterns and behaviors. The survey was exclusively carried in India and respondents were mostly from educational institutes. The survey revealed several interesting results. It shows that there are more male social-media users than female ones. Most of the social networking users are young people in the age group of 18–42 years of age. Among different departments in universities Computer Science and Engineering people are the chief users of Internet and social networking. 60 % of people spend less than an hour for email usage whereas around 90 % of them spend up to 5 h on social networking. 60 % of them use Internet heavily for online shopping, banking, travelling, research study and work. Around 60 % of them believe that social network helps them positively in personality development, freedom of expression, developing hobbies and increasing domain knowledge. However, around 50 % of them also agree about negative aspects of social networking like addiction, no social participation, insecurity and poor health. We also used factor analysis to categorize related set of questions and gain insight into these categories.