CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Reading is one of the oldest habits of human civilization. It has been the passion of the greatest personalities of all times. One of the first documentary sources for reading was manuscript, however, accessible only to the elite class of society. Later, the arrival of the Gutenberg printing press ended such discrimination by making the printed word available to all the Gutenberg printing press brought drastic changes to the fundamentally oral society of the day. It was certainly a great jump in the humanity’s onward march to the reading society. The emergence of the excessive browsing of social media has created an extraordinary change in the educational system. It has made its existence, fully or partially, in the reading is no longer confined to the print reading. The scope of reading sources has changed drastically in the social media revolution to include websites, webpages, e-books, e-journals, chatrooms e-papers email, discussion boards, instant messaging, blogs wikis, and other multimedia documents. Now the potential reader can access and browse the online information from the whole web while using his/her terminal at home. The hypertext and hypermedia technologies allow the e-readers to go from one page to another by selecting links in various directions popularly known as surfing. The term surfing of internet was first used by Jean Armour polly in 1992 and defined it as “browsing the internet while going from one page to another, the internet surfing enables to navigate a world full of interconnected information, discover new sites, read-up-to-date information, and download things from internet. Surfing the internet has become a daily routine of the new generation.

The present generation especially the college students are well versed with the new technologies and their application in present network society. It has been observed that the internet has fixed deep roots in lives of the new generations students than all other technological innovations. In the world is of the opinion that the young generation who have more experience with computers and grow up with this technology will reveal dierent attitude toward reading in digital environment. This union of the internet and students compels researchers to take a new look on their reading habits. It is reported that corporate giants Microsoft and adobe system have developed sophisticated e-book reader software that enhances the electronic reading experience. Hardware manufacturers such as Gemstar and Franklin continue produce new reading devices. Yet despite numerous advantages oered by various e-book readers and despite the widespread popularity of personal digital assistants (PDAS) and pocket PCS capable of reading electronic books, the e-book market has thus far failed to materialize. In spite of all new technological development in screen, text formats, and reading devices like LCE screen, PDF and Adobe reader have been designed to make e-reading easy; however, screens are yet to optional for the continuous indepth and concentrated reading.

It is a known fact that excessive browsing of social media has not only aected the reading practices but educational system as well. The social media has become the World Bank of information containing information on any field of knowledge. It contains a wide range of information sources from the online versions of print equivalents to born digital sources, image galleries to multimedia reference works, bibliographic indexes to full text data base, plain text to digitized facsimile, primary to tertiary documents access sources. Lee Gutenberg and McCrary reveal that 93 percent of all the newly produced information is being created on a digital format. The digital achieves like Amazon, internet Archieve Google Books, Gutenberg project, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Respositories (Open DOAR), Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Netlibrary, Questia, ebrary, and many others provide access to the billions of web pages. The availability of enormous information on varied subjects at one place is supposed to affect the reading choice of social media users. Social media has increased access to information, use of foreign sources, contacts with worldwide readers and time spend on reading, and has deceased dependence on print sources, contact with print sources, reading in local language and reading of books (Loan, 2011). Therefore, the present study is conducted to investigate the effect of internet on the educational system of secondary schools students.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The advent of internet has brought a great relief to human existence; thus, civilization and modernization are not far fetched. However, its advent has also contributed to the decline in education. Students in post-primary school and those in tertiary institution of learning devote most of their time, fondling their cell phones, others visits cyber-café to access facebook, Eskimi, 2go and a host of other internet media (social media) at the expense of concentrating on their education. Consequently, excessive browsing introduces individuals to the world crime. Youth of today are so versatile in internet manipulation that helps them perpetrate or carry out their evil plans (fraud). Once they succeed thy assume a higher economy status and life could not be more rosy. Such individuals see no reason to concentrate on education any longer and where they do, they tend to do it with levity hands. These half baked individuals later become nuisance to the society they belong to. Based on this, the researcher is curious as to know the extent to which education had declined due to the advent of internet which produces these social media.