Impacts of Internet on Academic Performance of Students

Throughout the world, Marketer and Consumer Buying Behavior (CBB) are changing the face of education. It has been argued that the, if a marketer can identify CBB, he or she will be in better position to target products and services at them. Just as computers are about to replace books (some would argue this has already happened) as our main source of information globally, computers will come to occupy the central position in education once occupied by books. The Internet was initially developed by the US Defense Department and was at one time only popular within the research community. Its ability to share information across organizations and to interact with people at low cost has gradually enticed other sectors to explore its use. Today, the Internet has an impact on every facet of our life including business operation, education, communication, entertainment, social activity, shopping, and so on. Many universities around the world are expanding their investment in information technology (IT), and specifically the Internet, and are actively promoting Internet use. From a student’s perspective, learning using online tools is multidimensional. It may entail a multitude of variables such as prior student knowledge of IT, experience in its usage, perceptions of IT usage, computer competencies, and background demographics.

The Internet is one of the greatest recent advancement in the world of information technology and has become a useful instrument that has fostered the process of making the world a global village. The Internet provides several opportunities for the academia. It is a mechanism for information dissemination and a medium for collaborative interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic limitation of space. The word Internet is derived from two words: “international” and “network”. The Internet therefore can be defined as an international computer network of information available to the public through modem links so internet is a worldwide system of linked computers networks. The Internet is the world’s largest and most widely used network. It is an international network of networks that is a collection of hundreds of thousands of private and public networks all over the world. There are rich and varied learning experiences available on the Internet that would have been inconceivable just a short while ago.

The Internet has a range of capabilities that organizations are using to exchange information internally or to communicate externally with other organizations. The primary infrastructure for e-commerce, e-banking, e-business, e-learning and virtual library is provided by the Internet technology. The Internet provides several opportunities for all academia, business organizations, the employed and the unemployed, the young and the old. The Internet is a ‘live’ constantly ‘moving’, theoretically borderless, potentially infinite space for the production and circulation of information. The Internet might thus be described as a ‘sea of information’, containing texts which are not housed between library and bookshop walls and subject areas span across all fields of knowledge. The Internet can be used for other things besides email.

One can listen to international radio station on research and education on the Internet, read national dailies of other countries, speak to friends around the global, read books and other materials on the Internet. The list of things that can be done on the Internet is a very long one. The Internet contains more