Friday 17 April 2009

Nothing productive about Facebook use

Two weeks ago most of the blogs around the place were talking up "a study" that "showed" regular users of Facebook, Twitter and TradeMe were "more productive" at work than those workers who didn't spend their time checking up on their friends and buying old tat, and who actually worked instead.

Go figure.

But now another study shows something somewhat different.  Specialising in the bleeding obvious, researchers at the education department at Ohio State University found 
 that 68 per cent of students who used Facebook had a significantly lower grade-point average than those who did not use the site.
For the benefit of regular Facebook users, that means they got lower marks.  Perhaps that was because
students prone to accumulating friends, uploading photographs, chatting and "poking" others on Facebook may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work...
So there are two conclusions we might draw here. One is that, for two-thirds of Ohio students at least, there's nothing productive about doing inane quizzes and reading pageloads of posts saying "lol cuz cool ta see yuz all."  The other is that taking any of these studies at face value is ridiculous.  And I have a study somewhere round here that shows that.

1 comment:

Falafulu Fisi said...

Hehe, I have told many people online that Facebook is useless and time-wasting. Only people who feel that they are exaggerated self-important find Facebook useful.

Facebook was valued at around $15 billions (US) last year, much more than Sun Microsystem which is reported to be talking with IBM for acquisition at a valuation of around $7 billions. If Facebook has to disappear today, the world would go on, like there wasn't any Facebook existed at all. It would be a different story if Sun Microsystem collapsed tomorrow.

These crazy startup valuations at Silicon Valley will lead to dotcom bubble 2. The sooner dotcom bubble 2 arrives, the better, since dotcom startups is what George Reisman (often quoted by PC here) called the mal-investment.

Another useless & time-wasting microblogging service called Twitter, was reported at TechCrunch to have been approached by Google for acquisition at between $500 million upto $1 billion. It would be a mistake by anyone to acquire these useless so called Web-2.0 startup companies, as dotcom bubble 2 is just around the corner.