CYBERCULTURE AND DAILY TRUST NEWSPAPER REPORTING ON INSECURITY IN NORTHWESTERN NIGERIA: A SOCIAL SEMIOTIC LENS

Abstract

This study investigates how cyberculture reshapes newspaper
reporting of insecurity in Northwestern Nigeria, addressing a gap in
media discourse studies that often overlooks the impact of digital
affordances on meaning-making practices. While kidnappings,
banditry and mass abductions dominate the media space in Nigeria,
little scholarly attention has been paid to the contemporary media
discourse investigations within the lens of social semiotics. Anchored
in social semiotics, drawing on the concept of recontextualization
(van Leeuwen, 2008), this study adopts a social semiotic multimodal
framework to examine a purposive sample of selected Nigerian
newspaper reports. Using social semiotic Kress and van Leeuwen
(1996), the analysis focuses on the interplay between linguistic and
visual resources, including headline, images, layout, and digitally
sourced contents. Findings reveal that newspaper reporting is
increasingly shaped by cybercultural dynamics such as real-time
dissemination, platform-driven visibility, and the integration of
content sharing. These affordances produce a hybrid discourse
marked by fragmentation, affective intensification, and
algorithmically influenced news values. This study argues that
newspaper representations of insecurity are no longer mere
reflections of events but actively reconstructed through multimodal
and digitally mediated practices. It contributes to scholarship by
extending social semiotic inquiry into cyberculture and
foregrounding the transformation of security discourse in the global
context.