CHAPTER ONE

1.0              INTRODUCTION

1.1              BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Alfred (2006) and Andrew (2005) says communication is a basic human need and for that reason, man has always found a means of meeting this need either through personal or mass communication.

Unlike in the part, the people of the world are today living in a global village because of various break through information technology.

According to a Canadian professor of English Marshell Mcluhan, “The world is now compressed into a single electronic chat room.

Katz (2009) opines that information that usually takes many days or weeks to dimension now takes seconds or minutes. It is now possible for people to make interpersonal communication with others to get desired information as quickly as possible from other areas of the country or form other countries with the use of social media without leaving their immediate environment.

The growth of technology towards the end of 20th century propelled by the emergency of the internet, satellite etc led to what is called social media. While social media on the other hand is a term in this present, world which means the encompasses of the emergency of digital, computerizsed or networked interactive information channel. It should be noted that because, also social media is a form of electronic communication which facilitates interaction based on certain interests and characteristics.

Social media are made for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publiching techniques. Social media use web-based technologies into social dialogue and one of such are facebook, twitter, eskimi and 2go social networking.

According to Harvard, sophomore and work Zuckerberg (2006) facebook was actually made by hacking Harvard’s data base containing identification images of students. facebook started as a local social network made for the students. the initial idea was actually to compare the faces of students with images due to potentially damaging contents of the site, the creators decided to put it down before it caught the attention of school authorities.

The application was shut down, but the idea of creating on online community of students came to existence. The plate form was then improved and sooner than they expected, face book was released in compuses other than Harvard.

Therefore, high schools were already starting to get attracted to the idea of having online communities, thus opening the website to the younger offered the opportunity to the rest of the world.