CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The development of various means of communication continues to emerge as the society develops. Different eras of development in the society, were marked with forms of communication suitable to the period. For instance, earlier forms of communication did not need any technology or skill but as the need to communicate with a wider audience grew, so did the channels, bringing writing and writing forms in its wake. That era introduced theories like the Bullet theory that dwells on the strong, direct effects of the media on people. The theory was based on the “push” model concept of the mass media, where the gatekeepers who decide what the audience will have, simply push the information to the receiver. With the advent of new technologies today, the focus has shifted. The Uses and Gratification Theory has actively displaced the Bullet theory in the sense that people, when they are not seeking out media to subscribe to, can/have become the media themselves. The „audience‟ has moved from being just consumers to producers of their own media. The internet media is based on the “pull” model where receivers pull only the information they want. Tools like blogging, podcasting, video blogging allow the average citizen the ability to pull what is relevant and also participate in producing content. The evolution of the internet provided the technological framework for the emergence of the social media platform. The Internet has been described as a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. This extended definition by Omojuwa (2012) captures the essence and function of the internet; It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email. Most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film, and television are reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).