Digital Awareness and Internet Usage by School Students
Archana Verma, Meeta Jha, Mitashree Mitra · JOURNAL OF PSYCHOSOCIAL RESEARCH · 2016
INTRODUCTIONInformation and Communication Technology (ICT) has revolutionized every walk of life today be it communication, governance, commerce, healthcare, education, entertainment, defense, etc., to list a few. ICT is influencing the society in the same way as was done by the machines in eighteenth century, perhaps on a far greater scale. Government of India has also acknowledged the constructive role of ICT in school education and have come out with a National Policy on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in School Education which has been revised in 2013 (Ministry of Human Resource, 2012). Internet and World Wide Web are main constituent of ICT. Internet usage worldwide has arisen exponentially in recent past, as of date about 3120 million people worldwide are using Internet (Internet Live Stat, 2015). About 20% of population in India is using Internet which is about 8.5% of world Internet users (India Internet Users, 2015). The number of mobile Internet user alone was expected to reach 213 million by June 2015 as per a report on Mobile Internet users in India of 2014 (Internet and Mobile Association of India, 2014). Interestingly, the explosion in the use of Internet has become possible due to affordable, readily available devices (gadgets) like laptops, tablets and mobile phones, particularly the availability of latter to the masses in even the rural areas of the country. Since the spread of Internet is countrywide, school children too are using Internet and how its contents especially the social networking sites, chat rooms, etc., are affecting them needs to be studied.In the present work, as a first step towards the study of impact of Internet and Social Networking sites/Social Media (SM), a is carried out among the school students of Raipur city of Chhattisgarh to study their awareness of use of these digital devices, Internet usage and spread of use of Social Media- SM. This to study the aforementioned technology usage is termed as survey on Digital Awareness of school children of 14 to 19 years, and it systematically analyses the gadgets owned and used by students for communication, Internet access, entertainment and social networking, etc. Studies of Internet usage, SM and effect of these on students are being actively investigated worldwide hence a relevant literature review is given next.LITERATURE REVIEWUse of Internet and its impact has been extensively studied worldwide and as per the report of Pew Internet and American Life Project (The Internet goes to college, 2002) it was found that about 25% college students began using computers between the age 5 and 8 and almost everyone started using computers and Internet by the age of 16 to 18 years. The usage of Internet has been reported in the areas of communication through e-mails, entertainment and browsing for fun. In United States, by 2011, 82.8 young individuals between the age group 18 to 34 years reported accessing Internet from computers at home, though this trend varied across demographics such as race and ethnicity (Computers and Internet use in the United States, 2013). Chan and Fang (2007) studied young people in Hong Kong and found that the Internet was used for different purposes such as for making friends, shopping, listening to music, having fun, completing homework, and searching for information on further education. Aslanidou and Menexes (2008) collected samples from 418 high school students in four Greek cities found that Internet access remained at a very low level and was insufficiently used for academic purposes. Hawi, (2012) conducted experiments on 883 school students in Lebanon and reported that 84.2% students used the Internet for communication and email, 65.7% for information search in research, and 51.8% for entertainment such as online games and music. Ayub, Wan, & Nawawi (2014) carried out an interesting study in Malaysian Institutions where no correlation was found between Internet access duration and use of Internet for academic purposes among agriculture, engineering students. …