Hello, my name is Frederick and my inquiry question is “Is social media good or bad for education?”
My first round of research involves finding how long and how many different types of people generally use social media and how much of their lives revolve around it.
I found that originally, around only 5% of people used social media platforms, but gradually over time, more and more people used it, rising up to 72% of the population in the USA in 2011.(1) I found that the types of people using social media were originally young adults, but eventually older users were more numerous.(1)
Here is a graph depicting the percent of people from a certain age group that uses social media (1):
This second graph shows how often they use the platforms(1):
We can see that the majority of people use social media daily and very little use it less frequently.
Currently, the global daily average in social media usage is 151 minutes, a slight step up compared to the 147 last year. This is, however, including many third world countries and countries that do not have much social media use. If we look at the USA, it shows that their citizens use on average 2 hours and 3 minutes of social media every day.(2)
With this information, we can tell that around ten percent of people’s daily lives revolve around social media, and around 1/8 of their day if we take out eight hours of sleep.(2) We can also see that 92.7% of people who can use social media, do use it.(3) Finally, on average, more females use social media than males do, around 30 more minutes in general.(4)
- https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabId=tab-81867c91-92ad-45b8-a964-a2a894f873ef
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/#:~:text=How%20much%20time%20do%20people,minutes%20in%20the%20previous%20year.
- https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/
- https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-statistics-for-social-media-managers/
Hi Frederick,
I found your blog post very interesting to read. I really liked your frequent use of graphs and statistics. They made it very easy to understand and absorb the information that you shared with readers. I didn’t know that females on average spent more time on social media and I would be interested in finding out why, since I think that that is a very interesting statistic. Below, I have provided some links that might help you with your research.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/why-are-more-women-than-men-on-instagram/485993/
https://csic.georgetown.edu/magazine/social-media-reshaping-todays-education-system/
Keep up the great work!
Penelope
Thank you for this post!!
I found the graphs and information you provided easy to understand and very interesting.
I appreciated that you included the different average social media usage globally and also solely in the USA. I found this helpful for me to get an accurate estimation of the average social media usage in Canada.
It would be interesting to explore the percentages of people using social media that are older and younger than 18 and determine if more adults or children are using social media. This may help you with your question as it puts a focus on high (and elementary/middle) school social media usage vs university or college social media usage.
These links might help you with your future blogs:
https://www.breezejmu.org/opinion/opinion-social-media-has-turned-college-students-into-mass-consumers/article_65ac8052-a7d9-11ed-9930-272f82cad2b1.html#:~:text=According%20to%20Experian%2C%2098%25%20of,students%20are%20on%20social%20media.&text=College%20students%20often%20knowingly%2C%20and,students%20are%20on%20social%20media.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071811/#:~:text=Studies%20revealed%20that%20among%20the,et%20al.%2C%202019).
Good luck with your research!
-Sarah
Hey Fredrick! This was a very interesting and informative post to read. I really enjoyed your use of graphs to make it more visually appealing as well as more understandable for your readers. As mentioned in your post, social media is such a big part of everyone’s daily lives at this point, and understanding the statistics behind it is something I find interesting. Something I think you could add to your future posts would be talking about how the content posted on social media continues to evolve and if you think it will evolve for the better of students in the upcoming years.
Here is a website I found that may help you answer your mini-question for your next blog post.
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-for-education/
This article talks about the positive effects social media has on the education system.
Your blog post was very interesting and I look forward to following your research regarding this topic.
Best of luck! Anannya B
Hi Frederick,
I found your post extremely eye-catching and interesting to read. I never knew how much social media impacts us and how often it is used. I found the graphs you included very easy to follow as they helped create a visual description of your main point. Social media is something that has truly changed the world and will continue to evolve. Something that you could add to your future posts could be about the effect social media has on older age groups and how it has impacted different workplaces. I can’t wait to read more about this and see your future posts on this topic!
Here is an article that may help you with your future posts;
https://www.hrmorning.com/articles/social-media-in-the-workplace/#:~:text=Can%20affect%20productivity%20during%20work,and%20affect%20your%20bottom%20line.
All the best!
– Ishani B
Hello Frederick,
I really loved looking at and reading your blog post.
All the graphs and charts made it very visually appealing to look and and were definitely a great visual.
I think this is a very important topic to become educated on as social media is just constantly growing and does not look like its any way near going away any time soon so becoming educated on it is a great way to learn to use social media as a tool to aid in certain processes for good!!
maybe a few more colourful pictures to really stand out could be nice!
here are some links to a few below if you are intrested
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncsc.gov.uk%2Fguidance%2Fsocial-media-how-to-use-it-safely&psig=AOvVaw1KranaoS7gQwVWgQOLfqLv&ust=1702630753280000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBAQjRxqFwoTCKjDhv_HjoMDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2F99designs.com%2Fblog%2Fmarketing-advertising%2Fsocial-media-style-guide%2F&psig=AOvVaw2iI-NCliXRb7Dw-EenmXtR&ust=1702630812715000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBAQjRxqFwoTCPCRi5zIjoMDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
Marisa