VISUAL MEDIA IN SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATIONS: APPLYING THE UNIFIED THEORY OF ACCEPTANCE AND USE OF TECHNOLOGY TO THE PREFERENCES OF EMIRATI UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: A THEORETICAL APPROACH
The development of the use of means of communication at the present time in the transmission of electronic digital technology of written, audio and visual information that contains speech, sound, numbers, words, charts, music, films and colors, and man has become able to store information and deal with it through smart phone, computer and other multi-use means that allow the transfer of different types of audio and video messages in a secure and identical manner, so that they can be broadcast and received immediately by the recipient, who in turn interacts with them in terms of storing, viewing and disposing of them. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is relied upon to understand the mechanism of students' preference and adoption of social networking sites and applications. This theory explains how users accept and use technology based on four factors: performance expectation, effort expectation, social impact, and facilitation conditions. The main objective of this research is to identify the theoretical approaches and previous literature that deals with and indicates the preference of users of social networking sites and the Internet for visual media to access information through Internet applications and smart devices. This study attempts to answer the following question: How does the previous literature explain students' adoption and acceptance of using visual media through social networking applications? In order to explore the effectiveness of the previous results of studying these applications in terms of expected performance, expected effort, expected social impact, and available facilities. Based on the assumptions of the (UTAUT). The research problem is that there is a clear adoption of some applications to the exclusion of others by students in varying proportions, which gives them a set of multiple options to access information according to the technical capabilities available in each application, and this is what gives visual media great importance in terms of the strength of its influence as it contains multimedia. and interactive such as sound, image, text, and animation. This study attempts to answer the following question: How do students explain their adoption and acceptance of using online videos? This is in order to explore the effectiveness of these applications in terms of expected performance, expected effort, expected social impact, and available facilities.
Keywords: Visual Media, Students' Preferences for Technology, University Students, Social Media, The Unified Theory of Technology Acceptance and Use