Uses and Gratifications

The ‘Uses and Gratifications’ model was first introduced by Elihu Katz; he asserted that audiences use media texts for gratification. Katz contended that there are four types ‘Uses and Gratifications’ audiences get from media texts:

* Personal identity: We can get a sense of ourselves and our peer group from media representations. This is probably particularly important for adolescents.

* Information: The media are full of information which we are at liberty to use.

* Entertainment: We often consume media texts for entertainment.

* Social interaction: The news, films or last night’s television programmes are common topics of discussion; we use the media to feed this social interaction. The media may also ‘keep us company’: radio, in particular addresses its audience on a personal basis. We may feel we know characters in, say, soap operas, better than we do our own friends and thus engage in parasocial (interpersonal relationships in which one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not) interaction when ‘interacting’ with them.