In April, Ohio State University rode the publicity wave provided by news outlets everywhere reporting the school’s finding that Facebook users had lower grades than non-Facebook users. A new study contradicts the first and the authors declare the opposite correlation while ripping on the first author’s methods.
An academic catfight ensued, and those are guaranteed as interesting as a solid round of knitting.
Un-academically, here’s the thesis and conclusion together:
Facebook can’t give you bad grades. It can’t give you good grades, either. Video games, shopping malls, bars and clubs, keggers, iPods, the Internet, YouTube, Hulu, television telephones, texting, church, sports, sex, boyfriends, girlfriends, and porn can’t give you bad grades either, just like cookies can’t make you fat but eating cookies can, just like books can’t make you smart but reading them can.
Professors and teachers can give you bad grades but more often people give themselves bad grades because they spent too much time on Facebook/MySpace/YouTube/WOW, at the shopping mall/parties/boyfriend’s place, on and on and on.
People choose their behaviors, their addictions, their obsessions, not the other way around, and students choose whether to study or screw around on Facebook. End of story, no need for research. Something else we don’t really need a study to know: Social students don’t do as well in school as non-social students.
Personally, I did well in school despite blowing off studies to go to movies or whatever, but my engineering major roommate who hardly left the dorm room except to go to class, did even better. Go figure, huh?