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.