An Assessment Of Facebook And Radio Advertisements On The Purchasing Habits Of University Students.
[A CASE STUDY OF GODFREY OKOYE UNIVERSITY THINKERS CORNER ENUGU]

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1          Introduction

The review of literature was divided into three sections which include conceptual review, empirical review and theoretical framework of the study. The conceptual review looked at major issues and variables surrounding or related to the study, the empirical review examined the studies carried out by published and unpublished works of communication scholars within this area of study and the theoretical framework looked at the various media theories supporting this study.

2.2          CONCEPTUAL REVIEW

    2.2.1     Audience of the mass media.

According to Compact Oxford English Dictionary an audience are the assembled spectators or listeners at an event. D’Antonio (2018) says that one can commonly think of an audience as a collection of people exposed to some form of media or another. There are different types of audience and looking from historical perspective of Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) whom identified different tpes of audience. They include;

a) The “simple audience‟ – face-to-face, direct communication, in public, often highly ritualised (theatre and books before the media age, political meetings.

b) The “mass audience‟  Blumler (1939) says that there are highly mediated, spatially dispersed, often in private; (newspapers readership, TV audience).

c) The “diffused audience‟ – this group are strongly dispersed and fragmented, yet embedded in all aspects of daily life; characterized by routine and casual inattention and yet always tuned, always on(-line).

We also have a different genre of audience which according to Parx (2013) include the audience of newspaper, television, radio, theatre, film and non-broadcast media. Audience of the above media are heterogeneously scattered. They are a mixture of age, sex, profession, education and social class etc and are strangers to one another. Audience is the ultimate source of mass media revenue meaning that if there is no audience to purchase movie tickets and recording, subscribe to newspapers, data bundles for the new media and magazines and attend to radio and TV programmes, no mass medium could stay in business. The messages of TV newspapers and film etc,. are determined according to the nature and behaviour of the target audiences.

           Parx (2013) went further to argue that there are different types of mass media audience   which are     the elite audience, the mass audience, the specialized audience, interactive audience

The Elite Audience comprises of highly educated people and their number in the society in relatively small. The Mass Audience represents the dominant majority in a society. They are relatively average people. Mass audience represents almost all segments of the society. The Specialized Audience refers to the special interest groups in the society.

The Interactive Audience consists of those who have control over the communication process in a society. They may be newspapers journalists or radio presenters. Blumer (1939) sees the audience of mass communication as “MASS”, He also listed some characteristics of the mass audience

• They are often large in number.
• There are widely dispersed.
• Its members are usually unknown to each other.
• They lack self awareness and self identity.
• They receive messages anonymously.
• They are heterogeneous in nature.
• They are incapable of acting together in an organized way to secure an objective but always acted upon.

Audience of the media        could be analyzed based on gender, in a research conducted by Budden and Jones (2007) it was discovered that females spend more time on Facebook than males although the difference was found to be statistically insignificant .Similarly, Pew (2018)  found that  Facebook demographics continue to skew heavily toward women with 83% of adult women using the network, compared to 75% of men

 Media audience could also be analyzed based on age . in recent times it has been assumed that the new media is mainly populated with the younger generation while the broadcast media has more of the millennial ,according to Pew social report, usage among each age demographic increased from 2014 to 2016.

• 88% of 18–29 year olds use Facebook.
• 84% of 30–49 year olds use Facebook.
• 72% of 50–64 year old use Facebook.
• 62% of 65+ year old use Facebook.

2.2.2 NEW MEDIA

New media can be said to be a conglomerate of modern day forms of communication which could include

Facebook,

WhatsApp,

Instagram,

Twitter and

Snapchat amongst others. 

Nesse (2016) describes new media as “those digital media that are interactive, incorporate two-way communication and involve some form of computing,” Robert Logan says in his book Understanding New Media that the New media is “very easily processed, stored, transformed, retrieved, hyperlinked and, perhaps most radical of all, easily searched for and accessed.” The new media are the outcomes of convergence, and they are core drivers of the digital creative economy. This is because they represent what media convergence is all about ,which is  focusing on the convergence of modes of communication and the blurring of boundaries between traditional media and their sub-sectors in the communications sector. More precisely, convergence between telecommunications and the traditional mass media, in particular with broadcasting is analysed (Pool,1983) , a pratical scenario is when on is using a smartphone he or she can make use of the new media installed in phone such as facebook, instagram etc and to perform interpersonal communication which could be in form of phone calls or private inboxes on the new media and can be moved to group communication when group chats are formed in these mediums and finally to mass communication when any one can put up an information and it can be seen by everyone . Broadcast mediums could be accessed through these same smart phones.

Whatever has pros has cons and in this case the disadvantage of  the new media is the lack of source credibility on information disseminated because everyone has the freedom to put up whatever they want to, not minding how credible that information  is because there are no presence of gatekeepers. Social media has the capability to allow consumers to have a two way communication  in real time with business can help business promote and advertise  their product or services although third parties could use this to their advantage to abuse business copyrights making them look less credible (Steinman and Hawkins ,2010).