Uses and Gratifications

I'll never forget when Facebook became an epidemic during my senior year of high school and the summer before freshman year of college. I'll never forget how excited and nervous I was when I received an e-mail on whom my seven roommates would be on campus. Within a week of getting the names and contact information, about five of the girls had already Facebooked me and I got a taste of what each of them were like. This article mentioned how students would use Facebook and even MySpace to friend their new and potential roommates when they enter college. That is why I found this article to be fascinating and well stated on the theories mentioned.

What I learned from this article was how uses and gratifications theory is defined and how it "can be viewed as a psychological communication perspective which focuses on how individual mass media and other forms of communication such as interpersonal communication to fulfill their needs and wants"(Rubin, 2002). I just had to directly quote it because this definition gives us a clear clarification and definition on how uses and gratifications relate to communication and how it ties into these two imperative networking sites.

What I found interesting and useful about this article were the results (the five themes) used to answer the question in the article: "To what extent do young adults use social networking sites (MySpace and Facebook) to fulfill their need and wants?" The five themes were efficient communication, convenient communication, curiosity about others, popularity, and relationship formation and reinforcement. I couldn't agree more on these five results (themes wise) because I know I, myself used MySpace back in the day, because it was popular and it was convenient. However, I use Facebook for all of the above five stated themes for the most part. This article made me more aware of what uses and gratifications are and how they relate online communication with these two networking sites.