Rural-Urban Differentials in the Attitude of Global Systems of Mobile Communication (GSM) Consumers to Merits and Demerits of GSM Technology in Ogun State, Nigeria

INTRODUCTION The world is changing at a fast pace and according to Oxelhein (1998), this has been attributed to globalization which is brought about by technological revolution (Ashton & Stacey, 1995) and increased investment in information technology (Stewart, Coulson, & Wilson, 2007). Information has been identified as one of the prime movers for the economic activities of production and exchange. Information is determinants of organizational change. Hence, every individual as well as organizations need information about environmental events, be it economic, social, political or cultural. Information serves as a base for competence development (Hamrefors, 1996), however the process of gathering information is not without difficulties (Frishammar, 2002). Therefore, the advent of the Global System of Mobile Communication (GSM) in Nigeria (in 2002/2003) has agreeably become the order of most day-to-day activities. This is because communication is said to be one of the important aspect in human existence (Madu & Adeniran, 2002) 'until you speak nothing speak for you'. As the world is getting computerized and more sophisticated through the inventions of modern technological gadgets, GSM among others cannot be over-emphasized. Consumers of modern technology including GSM are faced with numerous problems in making use of the technology. These range from acceptability to perceived cost saving, convenience and added value (Mackay, Parent, & Geminio, 2004; Kimery & McCord, 2006; Laukkanen, 2007; Mallat, 2007; Chen & Nath, 2008). Hence this study examined the attitude of respondents to the merits and demerits inherent in the use of cell phones (CP) in rural and urban Ogun State of Nigeria. METHODOLOGY The study was carried out in Urban and Rural areas in Ogun state of Nigeria. According to Adegbite (2003), Ogun state was created in 1976. Ogun state is situated within the tropics with landmass of 1,640,926 square kilometers with 20% being forest reserves. The state shears boundary with Republic of Benin (Dahomey) in the West, Lagos state and Atlantic ocean in the south, while in the East is bounded by Ondo state and Oyo state in the North. Ogun state has six ethnic groups with Yoruba as the general language of communication. Majority of the people practice Islam, Christianity and traditional religion. Ogun state has a population of about 3,728,000 people (Omonijo, Ajayi, & Agande, 2007). Farming is the main occupation of the people. Rice, cassava, yam, maize and banana are the major food crops grown in the study area. While the main cash crops are cocoa, kola nut, rubber and palm produce. Ogun state has a educational institutions, industries as well as health facilities and public utilities such as police station, commercial Banks, judiciary, etc. Two local governments were randomly selected and 70 respondents interviewed using structured questionnaire. However 66 information sets from the 70 were eventually found useful. Data on socio-economic and perception parameters were collected and analyzed using simple descriptive (averages and percentages) and Chi-square statistics. RESULT AND DISCUSSION Majority of the respondents in both the rural and urban location of the study area were males, however, there was a significant difference between the two locations in terms of gender distribution at 5% probability level (p less than 0.05). There were more male respondents in the rural than urban areas. Average age was higher in the rural area than the urban and the age was significantly different for the two locations at 1% probability level (p less than 0.01). This could be attributed to rural-urban drift. Furthermore, there was significant difference in marital and educational status (p less than 0.05) of respondents in the two locations. There were more uneducated respondents as well as those with low level of formal education in the rural area than in the urban. …