Students asked to use internet to advantage

Mr Andrews K. Mensah, Registrar of a Circuit Court in Ho said at the weekend that students cannot continue to demonstrate ill-will towards technological knowledge acquisition in the 21st Century and succeed.

He observed that the grandeur of the social media had taken the better part of students learning time at the expense of using the medium to research, deepen knowledge and become highly versatile and marketable in an era of limited avenues for employment.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in an interview, Mr Mensah said if the time students spent on social media could be translated into serious academic work, it would deepen innovation, knowledge branding, entrepreneurship and scholarship.

He recounted periods past, where parents could make reading and especially newspaper, part of the regimented growing up training models at home, which had been shelved to what he described as "Modernisation."

"You find students seriously glued to their Android phones, tablets and computers, deep in the night, using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google, Tumblr etc and dutifully chatting time away."

Mr Mensah said: "We are again in an era of frenzy for entertainment through music and movies," and these seemed to be consuming the man hours students needed to justify their academic inclusion but being wasted.

He thought that the information, communication and technology (ICT) highway should have opened greater opportunities ahead of the teeming youth to innovate and add value to trending academic issues than the social media craze.

Mr Mensah said the overarching effect of social media sites was that students spent too much time socialising on the internet and lesser time in person.

He said one positive attribution to fun-filled social media enabled students to multi-task and network saying beyond this, "Academic work is more paramount".

The Registrar urged duty bearers and the academia to set agenda for students and the youth in general to guard and guide their usage of the medium and challenge their mental forthrightness towards a more constructive consumption of ICT products for self-actualisation, nation building and development.

Mr Mensah appealed to parents, who were the first point of contact for students to step-up their monitoring and supervisory roles at home and challenged them to use social media constructively to be informed and well-educated.

According to data from the National Communication Authority, the number of mobile data subscribers rose to 18 million from 17.7 million in December 2015.