Gratifications from New Media

Abstract

Several uses and gratification (U&G) studies provide bases for understanding motivations for the uses of traditional mass media such as television and radio. As a new medium, U&G research on Internet has tended to rely on studies of such traditional media. This article assumes that Internet is a unique medium and offers a set of gratifications different from those offered by traditional mass media. This study, therefore, sought to first identify motivations for using the Internet and then extract the structure of gratifications. In addition, it determined the gratifications of male and female respondents separately assuming that access to and use of any new and emergent media tends to favour the male gender. The study identified an eight-factor gratification structure. The study concludes that the underlying motivations for the use of Internet for the entire sample as well as the male and the female sample, separately, varies slightly but is largely stable and consistent.

Redditors Revealed: Motivational Factors of the Reddit Community

“…Socializing/community building as a factor in posting content is consistent with the literature, explained by the concept of anticipatory socialization [25]. Anticipatory socialization means that users obtain social gratifications from sharing original or curated content with other users.…”

“…Though age is relevant for these two factors, it could also be viewed as a limitation given the fairly consistent age of Reddit users overall. It's possible that younger or older users have different motivational factors, or combinations of factors that were subsumed by the fact that the overwhelming majority of survey respondents fall in a narrow age range (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29). However, the demographics of Reddit [4] are comparable to those of the study population; thus, findings are generalizable to the general Reddit user population.…”

Change toward a Creative Society in Developing Contexts—Women’s Barriers to Learning by Information and Communication Technology

“…Rangaswamy's ( 2009) study of Internet cafés in the city of Mumbai in India found that the number of women visiting the cafés declined in the afternoon hours when the cafés became a predominantly "male space." Krishnatray et al (2010), in a study done in northern India, found that women do not use cyber cafés as much as men do, and the number of women visiting these cafés decreases further during the evening. Johnson's (2010) study on women's Internet use in the city of Chennai in India showed that they preferred to visit Internet cafés in the afternoon when there were fewer men around.…”

“…Women, especially those living in rural areas in developing countries, are still excluded from Internet access or do not have the skills to use it in a profitable way (UN, 2005). Recent studies report that even though Internet usage by women has increased dramatically, there still exists a gender gap, and the use of Internet by women in the developing context is not significant (Johnson, 2010;Krishnatray, Singh, Raghavan, & Varma, 2010;Pan et al, 2011;Purushothaman, 2013).…”

A multi-theoretical approach towards understanding news sharing in social media

“…Through sharing news stories in online communities, users may feel that they are making contributions to the group and therefore are affiliated with it. In addition, social media has extended an individual's social network to a global scope and facilitate interaction across different societies (Krishnatray et al, 2009). Many social media websites (e.g., YouTube, Twitter) are widely used by people from different countries with a variety of background.…”