A LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED DISCOURSE IN SELECT INSTANT AND TEXT MESSAGES OF NIGERIAN STUDENTS (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
Introduction
The advent of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has ushered in a new era of new media, signalling unbounded possibilities for language and communication studies. In actual fact, the ever increasing mobility of the Internet the world over has opened yet other dimensions to the study of language use in computer-mediated environment. This has been attributed to the upsurge in the
world’s telecommunication market and its antecedent penetration and adoption of the technology by the populace, coupled with the improvement of the network with the third generation (3G) mobile technology, which facilitates the convergence of the technologies of the mobile phones and that of the Internet. For instance, in 2006, Nigeria had an estimate of about 8 million Internet users, many of whom relied on
equipment at cybercafés. In 2007, Internet hosts totaled 1,968. Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.
In 2006 more than 32.3 million mobile cellular telephones and 1.7 million main lines were in use (International Telecommunication Union 2007). However, in 2010 with an estimated population of 150 million, there were 72.78 million active GSM subscribers on all the major networks, with 6.69
million active CDMA subscribers. Within the estimated population of the country, there were 10 million Internet users (Miniwatts Marketing Group 2009). Of this estimation, 1.72 million Nigerians are said to be on the Facebook, with penetration rate of 1.1%. Nigeria is thus among the leading subscribers in Africa which has a total Facebook population of 17,607,440, with global penetration of 1.7% as at August 31, 2010 (Internet World Statistics).
