Social Networking’s Influence on College Students Social networking has gained huge worldwide popularity in recent years, especially among college students. In China, college student is the main force of social networking, 97.7% of which are fond of instant messaging and 80.7% prefer social networking sites like micro-blog and Q-zone. Moreover, Michigan State University Original Study also finds that compared with Chinese students, American students are more tied to social media (2013). Therefore, nowadays there is a heated debate about advantages and disadvantages about social networking’s influence on college students.
Obviously, there are a number of positive features on social networking. It provides a convenient access to consolidate the relationship with people they know, make friends with strangers without restrictions of space and share happiness and sorrow. What’s more, social networking also has educational functions including reducing college drop-out rates, motivating students to work as a team, sending information about assignments, reminding students about deadline and stimulating students to help each other. There is no doubt that social networking plays a significant role in enriching students’ college lives.
However, every coin has two sides. There are also many disadvantages on the influence of social networking. Because of lack of self-restriction, many students would waste plenty of time to search the social networking sites unconsciously, followed by a strong tendency to blame themselves (Li, 2013). This kind of “soft addiction” and distraction was also confirmed by Zhang (2011) who conducted a survey by questionare of 500 Chinese college students from different schools and found that 33% students could not bear one-week life without social networking and 77% students could not help themselves accessing social networking site during classes. Furthermore, a social experiment was performed by Harrisburg University (Pilkington, 2010) to figure out the effect after initiating 'blackout' of all social networking sites. It turned out that some students became more concentrated on the tutor and making notes instead of having instant messaging running in classes.
topic：Social Networking’s Influence on College Students advantage：
1.provide a convenient access to communicate with people
2.motivate students work together
disadvantage：
1.waste students time to search the social networking
sites
2.some students became more concentrated on the tutor
and making notes instead of having instant messaging
running in classes.
Structure：introduce the topic——benefit（two aspects）——disadvantage （two aspects）。