How students use social media Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

How students use social media - Assignment Example According to the research carried out by Lenhart et al. (2010), people between 18 and 29 years of age account for 57 per cent of the total population of users of the social networks and maintain personal profiles on a range of social media websites. Pempek, Yermolayeva, and Calvert (2009) noted that although the amount of time spent by the users on social networking websites varied considerably, yet a vast majority of the users spend up to half an hour a day socializing on the social networking sites mostly from 9 p.m. to 12 a.m whereas students spend 47 minutes a day on the Facebook on average. More than half of the total population of students in colleges visits social networking sites numerously in a day (Sheldon, 2008). Types of social media commonly used by the students include but are not limited to blogs, chats on Twitter and Facebook, social networks, wikis, podcasts, videos, photo sharing on sites like Flickr, and gamification. A blog is a webpage or website that can easily be updated. Authors of blogs write regular entries in the format of a diary. The most interesting and effective blogs provide the students with an opportunity to engage in conversations with the bloggers as well as other readers who have commented on the blogs. Microblogging, as the name implies, is the process of writing very brief blog posts, that are sort of text messages. Presently, the most popular service of microblogging is provided by Twitter that provides the students with the opportunity to post the entries as long as 140 characters. Using Twitter, students can not only read their messages online but also can send their posts as text messages to one another’s mobiles. Social networking websites like Faceboo k serve as platforms using which the students can connect with one another and engage in different kinds of activities both academic and otherwise. Facebook and MySpace