THE REFLECTIONS OF MODERNIZATION IN THE NIGERIAN MEDIA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0    BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The broadcasting industry in Nigeria has come a long way from a humble beginning in 1959 and grown into a large industry. Attracting investments running into billions of naira. Today, the broadcast industry can boast of several radio and television stations allowing audience a variety of programmes.

McQuail (2008:) notes that it is an act of digitalization having immense significance to the computing  of ideas as it allows information of all kinds, in all formats to be carried with the same efficiency and also intermingled. The shift to modernization in the contemporary media world has created implications for traditional mass media products. However, these limitations are still very unclear. The more technology advances, the more coverage the realm of mass media will become with less need for traditional communication technologies. For example, the internet had transformed many communication norms creating more efficiency for not only individuals but also for businesses. However, McQuail suggest that traditional media have also benefited greatly from new efficient resources available (2008:)

The technological progress in general and the increasing use of communication and information technology is now sufficiently well advanced for it to be possible to forecast trends and define prospects, as well as to identify likely risk and stumbling blocks. Modernization in the broadcast sector is constantly making such advances which may facilitate braking barriers between persons and nations. That trend is without doubt irreversible. But the consequences which can now be foreseen are not necessarily beneficial.

According to MacBride (1980), the new technologies have ambiguous consequence since they bring with them the risk of making the existing communication systems more rigid and exaggerate their faults and dysfunctions. He noted that in setting up ever powerful, homogenous and centralized networks, there is a danger of accentuating the centralization of the public or institutional sources the information, of strengthening inequalities and in balances and of increasing the sense of irresponsibility and powerlessness of both individuals and communities. The multiplications of radio broadcasting frequencies and channels made available by direct broadcast satellites could bring diversification of objectives and audience, however, by intensifying competition, if may lead to the standardization of content and, at the international level, accentuate cultural dependence by increasing the use of imported programme. Again, as distance become an increasingly irrelevant factor in transmission cost in particular in the case of transmission by satellite but also in broadband digital transmission by microwave, light conductors and cables, the inequalities between developed and developing countries can diminish but they may be intensified as a result of concentration of these resources in the hands of a minority.

The advent of the internet is a phenomenon that had both existed and confounded those for long involved with the traditional mass media. A global network of computers which enables multimedia transmission of text, pictures, graphic, audio and video defies any of the old characteristics possible with the old media. And with its possibilities still unfolding, it is still difficult to firmly predict what the future implications would be for the old media of mass communication.

If Nigeria, with its large population and many resources had realized its possibilities as Africa’s potentially biggest economy, there should have been a concurrent growth in the abilities of its mass media. Leading Nigerian newspapers, broadcast media and even News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) could have developed pan-African, if not global outlooks, where-by most of the new technologies now available would have been called into service to facilitate such breadth and depth of coverage. But without the requisite economic development, the country will continue to drop further behind as the mass media in the more developed countries of the world take full innovation of the possibilities of technologies.

Radio involves the process by which message are sent through electrical waves. The medium had made meaningful impact on the lives of the people.  For example, the radio listening audience is larger than television audience for a sizeable portion of the day; because of its portability and accessibility. Also a radio serves as the quickest of fastest means of breaking or relating spot news.

Thus, the research work attempts to assess the reflections of modernization in highland FM Jos Plateau State.