Internet Use by Rural and Urban College Students: A Comparative Study

Internet has become the backbone of the modern education system. The academic community uses internet to satisfy its diverse needs; be it information, education, communication, or research. The students, who were born during full bloom of internet revolution, extensively use internet to satisfy their various needs. Therefore, the present study was conducted to compare the use of internet by the rural and urban college students and identify the problems faced while searching the internet. The stratified random sampling technique was employed to select students and data collected through a questionnaire. The results reveal that majority of the students are frequent users of the internet using internet from daily to weekly basis in which use by urban students is more than their rural counterparts. The findings further reveal that rural students mainly use internet at home whereas urban students highly use internet at commercial cyber cafes. Majority of the urban students use internet primarily for a specific information whereas rural students mostly use internet for education. Majority of students, irrespective of regional differences, don't use internet sources like e-magazines, e-journals, e-books, wikis and blogs up to their expected usage. The findings also indicate that both the rural and urban students face the same problems with slight variations like information overload (too many hits) followed by internet illiteracy (lack of internet operating/searching skills), financial barrier (paid information), and information pollution (too many irrelevant hits).