Transcription
Why are you watching this video? What made you click it? Are you researching or just killing time? Why, for that matter, do you watch any of the videos you watch on YouTube? Why do you watch the movies you watch, play the games you play, and read the papers you read? This is the premise of Uses and Gratification Theory, which we're going to be looking at in this video.
One of the earliest areas of research into the media was how the audience and producer engage with each other during the consumption of media. A very popular idea in the early 20th century was the effects model, which looked at what the media did to the audience. Think of it as an early moral panic, which suggested audiences are passive, at the mercy of whatever the media tells them. In this model, the power is with the media itself. Uses and Gratification, the topic of today's video, is an alternative area of media research which takes the viewpoint of audiences being active participants in the exchange of media. In other words, they use the media to satisfy their needs.
The theory is one which is developed from ideas dating back as far as the 1940s, but it was in the 1970s when researchers such as Blumler, Katz, and McQuail made links between Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how people use the media. In other words, how our basal needs, such as social connection and self-esteem, are gratified by the media. They detailed four primary needs the audiences are able to satisfy with the media.
Number one: Surveillance, or seeing information. Consider the texts that you read and watch to learn more about the world. Needless to say, uh, these tend to be factual texts. From a personal perspective, it's why I watch the news and documentaries; it's why I read the Times Educational Supplement; it's why I check Gamespot daily for gaming news. It's not necessarily information that I need to know, but it just satisfies my curiosity.
The next need that the media might satisfy is a sense of personal identity. These are texts which reinforce your own values or beliefs. I find this particularly poignant in formative years, where you're discovering who you are, what it means to be a man or a woman in the 21st century. Again, from my own experience, it's why I dabbled with men's magazines such as GQ and Men's Health in my late teens.
The third area is personal relationships. This is a category that acknowledges one of our most tragic truths in life: at times we all get a bit lonely. Luckily, we have the media. Consider all those programs you've watched over the years where you feel like you actually know the characters, and worse yet, by the end of the series you're not sure how you'll live without them. This is all evidence of the powerful bonds we're able to make with figures in the media, and it doesn't need to be exclusively with fictional characters. Consider breakfast radio DJs, columnists you love to read, and so on. Another side of this category is how it enables personal relationships within our own lives. Consider all those TV shows you watch purely because everyone else is watching and talking about them.
The final way in which audiences are gratified by the media is through diversion, and to a degree, features in all the texts that we watch. Sometimes we just need something to pass the time, or perhaps after a hard day at work you just want to escape by going on GTA 5 and blowing some stuff up. Whether you end the day by browsing Facebook, reading a magazine, or playing games, you're using the media as a diversion from the mundane of the real world.
So there you have it; that's Uses and Gratification in a nutshell. It's usually one of the first media theories that you're taught when you study media, probably, I think, because of how applicable it is to your own engagement with the media. Um, there's a whole world of research, and we've really just kind of touched the surface here, but it should set you in good stead if you do want to look into it any further. As always, thanks for watching, and feel free to leave any questions.