A Historical Overview of Uses and Gratifications Theory

Abstract

This paper is a part of the thesis: A Study on Chinese IPTV audience. In this study, on the basis of uses and gratifications theory, starting from IPTV audience demand, the author endeavors to explore how variables affect audience satisfaction and put forward feasible suggestions so as to improve IPTV audience satisfaction. Some mass communications scholars have contended that the uses and gratifications are not a rigorous social science theory. In this article, I argue just the opposite, and any attempt to speculate on the future direction of mass communication theory must seriously include the uses and gratifications approach. And, I assert that the emergence of computer-mediated communication has revived the significance of uses and gratifications. Theoretically and practically, for U&G scholars, however, the basic questions remain the same. Why do people become involved in one particular type of mediated communication or another, and what gratifications do they receive from it? Although we are likely to continue using traditional tools and typologies to answer these questions, we must also be prepared to expand our current theoretical models of U&G to include concepts such as interactivity, demassification, hypertextuality, asynchroneity, and interpersonal aspects of mediated communication