Abstract
The rate at which students crave for access to the Internet access has
increased dramatically. The purpose of the study is to ascertain the level
of awareness and use of social networking sites by students of
university of Nigeria, Nsukka. Specifically, the study sought to
determine the benefits of SNS to students and also examined the
problems encountered by these students, on their uses. Descriptive
survey was adopted for the study. Questionnaire and a follow-up
interview were used to collect data from the student respondents. The
population of the study consisted of 350 students randomly selected
from different departments and fields of study as sample for this study.
Out of this number, 301 or 86 percent of the responses were found
usable for the study. The mean result indicated that Face book (3.6),
SMS (3.5), U. Tube (3.4), Chat (3.4) and Twitter (3.1) are the most
popular SNS known by the students. Similarly the respondents used the
service to a great extent to download materials relevant to their studies
(3.6), the benefits derived by the students are mostly to increase the
resources gathering (3.5). The negative effects include exposure of
adolescents to illegitimate sexual knowledge (3.3). Recommendations
were also made on acceptable use of SNS by students.