No abstract

New technology has been credited with the ability to extend human senses. However, adaptation and use of technology has been reported to be intricately mediated by usefulness and ease of use of technology among other contingencies. While Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has provided the theoretical basis for adaptation and use of technology in a plethora of contexts, little, if any, study has examined the use of ubiquitous smart technological apparatus for academic purpose among the greatest adopters of the technology, university students. The current study examines students' intention of smartphone adoption from the TAM perspective. Data has been collected from students in two public universities in Malaysia and Nigeria. IBM-SPSS version 20.0 and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach with AMOS were used to analyze and test the hypothesized theoretical model. The results suggested that attitude, social influence and perceived usefulness were positively correlated with the respondents' intention towards using smartphones for educational purposes. Moreover, students' attitudes towards adoption of smartphones were directly predicted by perceived usefulness and directly self-efficacy, which in turn, had direct impact on students' perceptions of easiness and usefulness. .indings made a considerable contribution to the heuristic value of TAM and facilitated the maximization of smart technologies for educational purposes.

This study examined the individual and collective influence of conspiracy theories, misinformation and knowledge revolving around COVID-19, on public adoption of the Nigerian government’s containment policies. The study adopted the Survey, and Focus Group Discussion (FGD) methods. For the survey, a sample of 466 respondents were drawn from Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, while 24 participants were selected for the FGD. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and thematic approach were used to analyse data generated from the study. Results revealed a COVID-19 conspiratorial thinking among survey respondents and FGD participants, who were also familiar with the orgy of unbridled dissemination of misinformation and conspiracy theories in the social media space. Majority of respondents were knowledgeable about government’s COVID-19 containment policies and were practicing the recommended safety measures. Their decision was influenced by trust in opinion leaders, especially family members and medical experts.

Political distrust is prevalent in many parts of the world. Scholars have discovered many factors affecting political trust, but they have paid little attention to the influence of issue salience in the media on political trust. Focusing on the role of media in assigning salience to corruption issues in Nigeria, this study examined the influence of mainstream media and social media on political trust. In addition, we treated political participation as a mediating factor and investigated its effect on the relationship between perceived salience of corruption in media and political trust. A survey was conducted on a sample of 688 Nigerians aged above 18 years old using a multi-stage cluster sampling technique. The data was later analyzed using Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). We found that salience in media predicted political trust, and the effect was stronger for social media than mainstream media contexts. Our findings also suggested that political participation directly affected political trust and was a significant mediator that affected the relationships between salience in the mainstream media (SMM) and political trust and between salience in the social media (SSM) and political trust. The results imply that salience in media leads to political participation, leading to political trust. This study supports the assumptions of both agenda-setting and agenda-melding theories. It suggests that policymakers in Nigeria should adopt media, especially social media, to restore the people’s trust in government.

The centrality of media to political and civic engagement has received tremendous exploration in many climes across the globe. Similarly, the dynamism that characterised media landscape has oftentimes called for continuing interrogation of the role of media in democratic and civic movements, discourses and participations. While the advent of new/social media led to the comparative exploration of the potency of legacy and novel media, mixed findings have characterised these research endeavours. Besides, most of the findings originated from advanced democratic hemisphere. In view of this gap in the literature, this study sampled 350 Nigerian university students in Kwara state during the 2015 Nigerian General Election to examine the differential contributions of legacy and novel media to the youths' political engagement. Premised on media displacement theory, the study anticipates differences in the contribution of mainstream and new media to youths' political engagement, with new media precipitating more civic engagement than the mainstream media. Findings offer important contributions on the role of media to youths' political engagement in general and the continuing importance of the mainstream media to civic and political participation among the youths.