Effects of Social Media on Students: An Evaluation Approach in Turkey

Abstract

Today, social media has a great impact on people’s daily life. At this point, it can be said that social media enables people to ensure a practical communication channel with other people all over the world and perform many other information-related activities like reaching to the desired information, editing it or sharing it with other clients over the Internet—web environment. Because their highly interactive using features and functions, social media services are widely used by people, over computers or computer related systems like mobile devices. In time, communication and interaction related benefits of social media have enabled this approach to be used within different fields of the modern life. The education field is one of these fields in which social media has a remarkable popularity. In the sense of the related explanations, objective of this work is to evaluate effects of social media on students. At this point, effects of social media on students have been examined by using a student survey tool. In this sense, a total of 102 university students (from different departments—study areas) have been enabled to fill different survey sections in order to receive responses for especially some statements regarding to effects of social media over students’ general activities. In order to ensure a specific evaluation perspective, the work has been done in Turkey and in this way; positive and negative effects of social media over Turkish students have been analyzed briefly. The work has been done because evaluating both positive and negative effects of social media on students makes it possible to analyze better importance of social media within students’ life and obtain some certain ideas about effects of the social media on improving students’ knowledge and abilities or just limiting them. Obtained findings with this work show that the social media affects (Turkish) students generally in a positive manner. But it can also be said that negative use of social media can prevent students from improving their cognitive level and affects their social and physical aspects in a negative manner.