Technophobia phenomenon in higher educational institution: A case study

In today's exponentially growth of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) lead to a major impact of social interaction and network among people especially students in higher educational institutions. Some students maybe too obsessed with the changes and cannot be denied that some students might be afraid to stay in this trend of ICT advancement. This situation will contribute to the phenomena of technophobia that supposing looking at it not as a simple but serious to be solved concurrently. This paper shares a valuable fact on the issue of technophobia and technological sophistication based on a quantitative research that has been conducted in University Technology MARA (UiTM) Kedah, Malaysia. The issue of technophobia was measured by identifying three different elements and they are anxiety, cognitions and attitudes toward computer technology. This paper highlights four different scopes in measuring technological sophistication; Consumer technology (automated teller machine (ATM), microwave ovens, CD/DVD player, washing machine and mobile phone); University computing (computerized library system (Web OPAC and Web Infoline); Application program (word processor, spreadsheet and database) and; Computer ownership. The level of technophobia has related to three categories identified which is computer anxiety (CARS-C), computer thoughts (CTS-C), and general attitudes towards computer (GATC-C). For the CARS-C, the study found that more than 70% of respondents are anxious towards a computer technology such as keen to keep abreast with its terminologies and interested to learn computer programs. The results of CTS-C show that 52.1% of the respondents agreed that using computer is an enjoyable in daily tasks. However, for the GATC-C, approximately 20% of respondents have the negative attitudes towards the existence of computers and it shows still the issue of technophobia must be solved and not supposed to occur in higher educational institution.