Varsity Net addiction

AT TWO universities, students are losing sleep and studying less and the culprit is not hard partying – it’s internet addiction and it has researchers worried.

A survey of 390 undergraduate students from the universities of Fort Hare and Nelson Mandela has revealed the impact the internet has on academic work.

The results appeared in a paper titled “Digital Media Usage and Prevalence of Internet Addiction among Undergraduate Students in South Africa”, which was published in the International Journal of Web Applications.

“These findings clearly suggest that the uncontrolled use of new media is both a hazard and a potential danger to academic productivity,” wrote the authors.

To understand student internet usage, the three researchers drafted a series of questions, asking how much and how often they used the internet.

What they found was that a third of the respondents used the internet for non-academic purposes for 10 hours or more a day.

Asked what they spent their time using the internet for, the respondents said they spent about 40% of their time daily for study purposes, while about 26% said they used the internet daily for academic research purposes.

On the other hand, researchers found that students used instant messaging programs just over 88% of the time.

When the researchers asked if the respondents slept less because of internet use, nearly half said they often did.

A third said they regularly spent less time studying because of Web surfing.