EFFECTIVENESS OF NEW MEDIA ON ELECTORATES POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE, PARTICIPATION AND CHOICE OF CANDIDATE DURING 2019 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NIGERIA
In recent time, there has been a growing recognition, acceptability and utilization of new media of any forms by the current Nigerian political parties, politicians , electorates and other stakeholders in electioneering processes. This is a sharp contrast to what has been obtained in the build up to the past general elections from first republic to the tail end of third republic, where the traditional media was dominant and means of communications during electioneering process. However the dependence on the traditional media for political campaigns will certainly be noticeable and cannot be completely discarded because it compliments each other, the modern trends of the new media seem to be eroding the gains of the traditional media. The application of the new media into presidential election campaign of President Good Ebele Jonathan was the turnaround in Nigeria electioneering process and it has changed the rules of political communication, and since then electoral campaigns have been more propagated on social networking sites; using the existing and emerging new media platforms than the conventional media approach which emphasized more of one-way communication with its shortcoming to generate feedbacks. These new media connect politicians with electorates and sell to them the transparency associated with their manifestoes.
However, every academic discourse requires an input from what is already in existence. This is usually in the form of citations, where particular emphasis has been on how relevant this is with what is currently being studied. Therefore, it becomes imperative to say that human knowledge is undoubtedly an elevation of the construction of previous findings in which case the later acts as a foundational framework of the former.