Impact of Information & Communication Technologies (Icts) On The Place Attachment in Downtown Katameya Mall

Abstract

Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) dominate many aspects of our daily life. People have more interest in ICTs than the social element. Meanwhile, the excessive use of the internet, mobile apps, and digital social networks make people prefer online communities to physical public spaces. So rapid and intense depending on technology causes problems such as the fading relation between people and their places. The study aims to discuss and identify the impact of ICTs on place attachment. It depends on a deductive method through data analysis of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) to get the ICTs attributes and deduce its impact on place attachment (PA) attributes. The main findings of the research are: the significant impacts of ICTs on PA are on people’s hub, and there is no significant impact on the place’s hub. A questionnaire of Likert-type scale to measure the impact of ICTs on the PA for the downtown mall has been applied to a sample of 33 persons: 16 males and 17 females, ages of the targeted sample are between 22-48 years old. The targeted sample is people who have been to the mall before. People in the targeted sample were asked 24 questions about the impact of each ICT's key performance indicator -KPIs- on attributes of PA to measure the impact of ICTs on PA. They were asked to rate the impact of each of the four ICT KPIs on the six PA attributes to measure their feelings of comfort, feel of safety, feel of the significance of the place, how ICTs make the place more identified, providing conditions to fulfill their functional needs, and supporting their behavioral goals. The data analysis of the questionnaire was constructed using descriptive statistics to convert the qualitative measuring of the Likert-type scale to numbers through getting the median, mean, and standard deviation to classify the most and least affected attributes of PA by ICTs. Comfort is almost the same for both older and younger people in the sample, so Downtown Katameya mall can be considered a place to enhance the user’s feel of comfort. The eldest and youngest have a bit higher feeling of safety. Meanwhile, they strongly depend on ICTs for their safety. They also have a higher feel of the significance of the place, believe that the ICTs well identify the place, provide conditions to fulfill their functional needs, and support their behavioral goals.