Facebook and Student Essay Example for Free

Facebook and Student Essay People use Facebook for many reasons; some of them consider it the vehicle to communicate with their friends, including old friends or current friends; some agree that it also helps them relax when they are stressful; others, on the other hand, might argue that Facebook brings distractions to them (Facebook 101). For instance, my friend, a quite person, did not socialize with people in both real life and in the Internet community. However, after knowing Facebook in a short period of time, he became addicted to it. He used most of his time to chat with friends, to play games, and to stare at his Facebook profile. Now, his friends list comes up to 300 and he daily logs on Facebook from 3 to 4 hours a day. Hopefully, this research of our group will help college students get better understanding of the role of Facebook in students’ lives. Moreover, not only students in general but also people of all ages will gain their cognitive of the advantages and disadvantages of Facebook. The research will benefit reader to determine whether Facebook is good or bad for human being. Furthermore, if people use it as a habit or want to check of how frequently they use it, they could apply this research as an important source to figure out whether they are addicted to Facebook or not, or where they are in the rank. Hypotheses: Our research paper is mainly focused on the impacts of Facebook on BHCC students. The effects will be discussed on both negative and positive sides of Facebook. First of all, we predict that Facebook will mostly bring negative effects on students and employees. If they use it so repeatedly, they might be addicted and cause distractions in working or studying. This is already proved in the story of my friend. Secondly, because of the separation of geographies or busy life, people tend to talk less and type more in this modern life. So, we also want to check it out of how many percentages that Facebook occupies our private lives. The last assumption will mention about privacy threat on Facebook. On the other hand, besides of its negative, our group wants to observe how people use Facebook effectively since it is the most useful communication tool to most people. Research Method: Our research was done with the survey format of 22 questions. We developed questions with many concerns about Facebook. All the questions were related directly to our purposes, which are substitution of social life, distractions to school/work, privacy theft, and communication tool. Approximately each category will cover from 4 to 5 questions to get into deep understanding of the aspects. Each of the questions shows the list of answers for participants to demonstrate their thoughts. When we provide the survey to participants, we are not stay close to them to make sure that they could feel comfortable when filling the questions. We are not going to record any participants’ names and to remain them anonymous. To do that, we could get the answers honestly and that would serve the expectation of our group. Participants and Procedure: Our group met several times for the research very carefully to discuss what we would do for the plan. First, we decided to work on Facebook but it was such the general issue for us whether to go on its good or bad sides. Properly, many college students just see advantage sides but they do not perspective of its side effects. Hence, we combined both sides, and decided that we would concentrate more on the negative effects of Facebook. After gathering all the questions of each member, we filtered and arranged them in order in the survey. To collect and choose which questions are suitable for out hypotheses, it took us almost two weeks to come up with all agreements. Understanding that people are hesitating to help our research, the reasons are vary as they are in rush, they are lazy, or even they do not want to listen to what we talking about. Furthermore, we targeted on BHCC’s college student, so we finally chose to go to the BHCC’s library or started with our other classmates to get the results. Moreover, we provided our team members spent a week conducting the survey to ensure that they could do the project thoroughly. Especially, we already created Facebook group account for our members to share, to debate, and to discuss and make sure we were on the right track. Surprisingly, the results came out our pleasure: BHCC’s students were eager and happy to help us when asked to fill out with Facebook questions. However, very few numbers of participants answer our  survey quickly and unready, so we already ignore those minorities. Data Results and Analysis: Our group had a total of 162 surveys, which were added by all of our group members. In our last question we asking people about â€Å"What would you rather describe Facebook as?†, and the result did not surprise us, we already knew that as an assumption. More than half of our participants –118 out of 162 or 73 percent of total result consented that Facebook as a useful communication too. Some of them added that they used Facebook to communicate with friends and families, to share pictures, videos, status and information, or to kill time if bored; therefore, most of them choose to pick its good side as an answer. The last 27 percent, 44 of 162, chose â€Å"a powerful distraction† as the result (Figure 1). As you can see on the chart (Figure 2), it can explain why three-fourth of our participants prefers Facebook as useful tool (Figure 1). There are so many ways to use Facebook that suite with people interests. The majority of participants use Facebook to check mail, to chat, to communicate, and to update friends’ information as 97 of 497 (19%), 80 of 497 (16%), 75 of 497 (15%), and 62 of 497 (13%) respectively. Besides that, 4% users also log in Facebook for playing games/quizzes, and 9% use it for relaxing when bored. It is interesting that there are a small number of participants – 11 students, approximately 2% in total choose Facebook as a studying tool. As we mention above, Facebook is also distractive at work and school, and the statistic already proved this. 56 percentages – slightly above half of the percentages access to Facebook at home, 21 percentages and 4 percentages do that at work and school. The rest 19 percentages access by cell phones; even though we do not know exactly where they use them, we indicate they are not properly use them at home. (Figure 3) According to the results from survey, we divided this bar chart into two categories: addicted group and non-addicted group. The first group includes many times/day, more than 2 hours/day, 1-2 hours/day, and 3-5 hours/week. The other is 1-2 hours/week and less than an hour/week. Both groups have  nearly equal balance about 50 percent each; therefore, we could have more trustful information and it is not bias. (Figure 4) After all, we conclude BHCC’s students are not really addicted on Facebook. They contribute equally in both studying/working and relaxing on Facebook. We agree that Facebook right now is the most popular use in the world and it is on the way growing up, yet it still cannot replace other multimedia communications like phones in general, instant messengers, and in direct with person. In the figure 5, Facebook occupies the smallest percentage in the pie chart with 17%. The next two common ways of communicating with friends are using instant messengers like Yahoo, AIM, MSN, or Skype (19%), and socializing with friend face to face (18%). Absolutely, instant messengers and in person have theirs advantages in communication because we can listen and talk simultaneously, or even we can see our partner faces by webcams. The largest percentage is using phones which are 46%. They are still the most familiar way to exchange all the time by talking and texting. We assume that because of its lack of â€Å"live† features like those above, Facebook still cannot be a substitution in personal life. Figure 6 and figure 7 show us â€Å"How many friends are there in participant friend’s list?†, and â€Å"With how many out of your Facebook friends do you frequently communicate?† People tent to protect their privacies by having fewer friends than ever on Facebook, 53 percentages and 35 percentages are chosen to have less than 100 friends and from 100 to 200 friends in friends’ list (Figure 6). In there, 25% and 50% is the most common rank to contact with friends on friends’ list, approximately 52 percentages. The next best option is less than 25% with 31 percentages (Figure 7). Our results in the survey proved that people do not really want to socialize usually on Facebook; they just need Facebook to relax, not the place for them to put their personal information. In the next graph will show how Facebook users think of privacy when using it. (Figure 8) More than half of our respondents do not want to add unknown people as friends, about 70% (Figure 8). This could be explained, if they add them as friends, they do not contact with them on Facebook, according to figure 7. Generally speaking, people do not want to express themselves on social network. Conclusion: The result of doing this survey gives us better interpretation of how a social network could affect on people life. Especially BHCC’s students, they adopt and love Facebook’s features, but they could still control their time spending on it. Therefore, most of the students consider Facebook a helpful tool to socialize with others. Even though Facebook is good for students to communicate with other people and make their social life happier, sometimes, Facebook appears to be a distraction to their study and private life. Using Facebook too much can make student exhausted and also affect their health badly. In addition, it is important to realize that Facebook is only an online tool, and it cannot replace human being’s activities. Students should allocate their time spending on studying, socializing, and using Facebook effectively, so that they can balance their real life and their online life to avoid being distracted by any network. Limitation: Even our team has done with the research, but it still has limitations when doing this. Due to the lack of processing time and missing experience in each member of us, we extend more time on choosing questions, or picking for secondary research, and then filtering the result as well. The amount of seven weeks seems not enough for us to accomplish a professional research as others. In addition, funding is also significant too. Because we did have any fund for the research, so we mainly focus on BHCC college’s students and limit on the number of respondents. In our questionnaires, we would want to ask more questions about how distractive in performance of workers and students at Bunker Hill Community College, and we desire to collect more information from school staffs and professors. However, our results from the participants are appropriated because of respondent’s excitements and their honest answers. We are glad that they did cooperate very well with us. Works Cited N.p., n.d. â€Å"Facebook- The Complete Biography† Web. 13 May 2010. . â€Å"Facebook 101: Ten Things You Need to Know About Facebook.† EBSCOhost. Ed. Thomas Krivak. Information Today Inc. 2010. Web. 01 May 2010 .