ROLE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY IN ACHIEVING COMMUNICATION EFFICIENCY IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

The key to success in the global technology is to celebrate technology the global technology is to celebrate technology rather than hide it away and to really start developing it where nothing has been done (Masayuki Kukokowa, 2012). This new or modern information technology I networked or webbed information. This metamorphic transformation points increasingly to practical terms, a global information technology. It is best described as a new millennium.  It is compact, sophisticated, revolutionary, goal-oriented and to sum up, a complex but cherishable culture of the new society.  BILL GATE as a giant in the present information technology ushered in the webbed information global phenomena. The west as well as the North have shown tremendously a growing wave and crave for information revolution. Nigeria has remained in an abysmal trance and has steadily watched the rest   of the world being ahead of her in the present dispensation.  Improvement takes two things, creativity and experience.  What this study emphasize is the place of modern technologies in achieving communication efficiency and argument for our critique is not whether Nigeria has shown any interest in modern technologies but the extent to which these modern technologies have helped in achieving communication efficiency in the new millennium.  When a retrospect is made, I easily recall that communication got its name from the Latin name “Communis” meaning show commonness.  This further implies an exchange of ideas, values, thinking and orientations among people from different geographical, political, economic, social, cultural, religious and then lingual expressions.

The history of communications and information technology dates back to Shakespearean “ACTADIURA” and plausible information invention.  Successively and very glaring, society is dynamic and so is the communication word.  The parries primitive Egyptian technologist become the “IN THING” crude as it was, it served the same purpose any other model can serve today. Gutenberg came and endowed the world with letter and printing presses. It was an era of a blood based catalytic information outreached and development.  As society continued to grow, move and move horizons were exposed and humanity (technologists) availed themselves of the opportunity and then as far   back as 1859, a Reverend gentleman by name Henry Townsend after looking for a better way to reach the illiterate interior Nigeria societies established the first Newspaper, “IWE-IROHIN’. A paper for the Egbe and Yorubas. The transformation continued through the electronic media channels; Television, Radio and others.  Thus, the present millennium where the internet operations, digital phones, keeping compact systems, cellular mobile systems, computerized data-base information inventions, e-mails, Fax-technologies which take the domain of the global information is to only exciting but interesting.  T.W. Kang-a Tokoyo based business consultant noted that “The real purpose of the new information technology is to increase efficiency and competitiveness.

However, Ehikhamenor (1993) described this information revolution as fundamental changes in the production and use of information, occurring in the late 20th century which demands caution, especially in the face of the Internet, as it lacks the activities of the gatekeepers who can decide what information to disseminate and what not to make available for the public. Meanwhile, the new media, which the Internet is one of them, has gone a long way in bringing information to one’s doorstep. It is a known fact that journalists in Nigerian who want to report adequate information about the widest topical issues will benefit from the service of the Internet as source of gathering information and making it possible for journalists to exchange information. The Internet can also help the Nigerian journalists to peak into the daily affairs of the public without physical presence of journalists which reduces traveling and hotel accommodation cost and stress. Therefore, the impact of the Internet on journalists cannot be over emphasized for it is an essential source where journalists can access information at all times (Uche, 2005).

Not only that the entire national technological culture is in a sorry state, communication is suffering an even deadlier scourge.  There is no opportunity for creativity, skill and experience, research and other things capable of engendering positivism in the information environment are lacking. Strange is the problem in Nigerian that this study faces one singular problem of finding out the rate of communication efficiency in the face of the modern information technology.  The information technology being referred to have will not only serve to educate, socialize, entertain and crystallize ideas but the type that will bring us nearer to the rest of the world in the minute lapse of time within unimaginable distance, hence the study tends to research on the role of modern technology in achieving communication efficiency in Nigeria.