CAN we achieve excellence in this age of social media? We emphasise access to education and employment to better our lives, however, beyond access, we should seek to excel in what we do.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal has been hosting its annual graduation ceremonies. What caught my attention is the statistic that out of the 9486 graduates in 2012, only 4% of them were conferred with cum laude and suma cum laude when they received their degrees.
This means that 96% of the graduates, on average, know less than 75% of their work. The grading of marks is an indication of excellence. What can we attribute this lack of excellence to?
There are multiple structural problems that inhibit people from excelling, but we must also probe some of our social behaviours that do not overtly seem destructive.
I wish to explore the ill-discipline of social media and its potential to corrupt people, especially today's young generation, from attaining the best results from their work, whether it be academic or corporate.
In this age of smartphones and of vast social media, what are the chances of people being distracted from their mainstream work?
If you take five minutes off every 30 minutes to check chats on your cellphone, that is 80 minutes (16.67%) of your eight-hour working day, which could be used productively.
Someone said recently that social media is like a drug. You get hooked on it and then it consumes you, gives you reason to return to it and eventually makes you dysfunctional as you struggle to meet deadlines or even have imagined "insomnia" caused by the desire to chat and follow friends in the world of social media.
I am posing a challenge to fellow academics and researchers to probe the impact of social media in the productivity of South Africans.
The world over, technology is being praised for being on the cutting edge, connecting the globe, creating a small village and enhancing our capacity and speed to share information across the length and breadth of this world.
However, we must be reminded that there are consumers and manufacturers of this technology.
Currently, South Africa is a consumer of technology and this is where much trouble stems from. About 33.3% of South Africans have access to the Internet and this is mainly those citizens in the mainstream productive spheres of knowledge and economy.
The obsession with social media has the potential to widen the divide between people who have general knowledge versus those with particular knowledge (specialists). Young people in tertiary institutions and those newly graduated to the workplace are facing the danger of not accumulating general knowledge because they are consumed by social media and thus cannot achieve excellent results worthy of cum laude or suma cum laude status.
As young people, we are growing up in an age of distractions. We are always impatient and restless at work, seeking the end of the day to come for us to attend to our smartphones and to explore the world of social media.
Unlike past generations that had no cellphones nor televisions, let alone DStv, this current generation has to manoeuvre its way around all these distractions and still achieve greatness in the work it conducts.
The problem is that social media and TV shows have taken centre stage in conversations of people and not in their academic work, political developments or strategies on how to find and improve their emerging businesses.
If you browse conversations that people have on Facebook, there is a lot of rehashing of television shows, sports matches and other material that could easily go by without being discussed.
On Twitter, people are always on the lookout for what has been coined #twar (twitter war) - where people are arguing rudely and unconstructively. There is no appetite for thought-provoking discussions that critique the status quo with the need to alter it for the betterment of South Africa.
Young people seem to defer such responsibility to others.
Social media is potentially distracting young people from taking ownership of their future, today.
- Mnguni is a youth activist and a postgraduate student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Social media hampering success of young people
CAN we achieve excellence in this age of social media? We emphasise access to education and employment to better our lives, however, beyond access, we should seek to excel in what we do.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal has been hosting its annual graduation ceremonies. What caught my attention is the statistic that out of the 9486 graduates in 2012, only 4% of them were conferred with cum laude and suma cum laude when they received their degrees.
This means that 96% of the graduates, on average, know less than 75% of their work. The grading of marks is an indication of excellence. What can we attribute this lack of excellence to?
There are multiple structural problems that inhibit people from excelling, but we must also probe some of our social behaviours that do not overtly seem destructive.
I wish to explore the ill-discipline of social media and its potential to corrupt people, especially today's young generation, from attaining the best results from their work, whether it be academic or corporate.
In this age of smartphones and of vast social media, what are the chances of people being distracted from their mainstream work?
If you take five minutes off every 30 minutes to check chats on your cellphone, that is 80 minutes (16.67%) of your eight-hour working day, which could be used productively.
Someone said recently that social media is like a drug. You get hooked on it and then it consumes you, gives you reason to return to it and eventually makes you dysfunctional as you struggle to meet deadlines or even have imagined "insomnia" caused by the desire to chat and follow friends in the world of social media.
I am posing a challenge to fellow academics and researchers to probe the impact of social media in the productivity of South Africans.
The world over, technology is being praised for being on the cutting edge, connecting the globe, creating a small village and enhancing our capacity and speed to share information across the length and breadth of this world.
However, we must be reminded that there are consumers and manufacturers of this technology.
Currently, South Africa is a consumer of technology and this is where much trouble stems from. About 33.3% of South Africans have access to the Internet and this is mainly those citizens in the mainstream productive spheres of knowledge and economy.
The obsession with social media has the potential to widen the divide between people who have general knowledge versus those with particular knowledge (specialists). Young people in tertiary institutions and those newly graduated to the workplace are facing the danger of not accumulating general knowledge because they are consumed by social media and thus cannot achieve excellent results worthy of cum laude or suma cum laude status.
As young people, we are growing up in an age of distractions. We are always impatient and restless at work, seeking the end of the day to come for us to attend to our smartphones and to explore the world of social media.
Unlike past generations that had no cellphones nor televisions, let alone DStv, this current generation has to manoeuvre its way around all these distractions and still achieve greatness in the work it conducts.
The problem is that social media and TV shows have taken centre stage in conversations of people and not in their academic work, political developments or strategies on how to find and improve their emerging businesses.
If you browse conversations that people have on Facebook, there is a lot of rehashing of television shows, sports matches and other material that could easily go by without being discussed.
On Twitter, people are always on the lookout for what has been coined #twar (twitter war) - where people are arguing rudely and unconstructively. There is no appetite for thought-provoking discussions that critique the status quo with the need to alter it for the betterment of South Africa.
Young people seem to defer such responsibility to others.
Social media is potentially distracting young people from taking ownership of their future, today.
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