Uses & Gratifications Theory

USES & GRATIFICATIONS THEORY

Uses and gratifications theory (UGT) is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs.

According to the research, goals for media use can be grouped into five uses. The audience wants to:

1. be informed or educated
2. identify with characters of the situation in the media environment
3. simple entertainment
4. enhance social interaction
5. escape from the stresses of daily life

Research has shown that media taken in for entertainment purposes (i.e., movies, songs, television, etc.) have a wide range of uses and emotional gratifications.

• Mood management: When in a bad mood, bored, or over-aroused, people will seek media as regulation for or distraction from their mood.
• Affective disposition: Affective disposition theory states that people enjoy "rooting for" characters depicted as good and moral. Users experience gratification when good things happen to characters with "good" morals and also when bad things happen to "evil" or "bad" characters.
• Sensation seeking: This use and gratification can be understood when considering excitement as its own reward.
• Intrinsic motivation: If the user experiences a challenge to his or her media-related skills, but not to the point of being frustrated or overwhelmed, then the gratification is a reward in a feeling of competence that inspires the user to continue using the media in question.
• Relationship functions of entertainment: According to this particular branch of use and gratification, we use entertainment to apply lessons to or escape from our real-life relationships.

• Parasocial relationships: Consumers of entertainment media sometimes use it to gratify a need for social connection by becoming very attached to characters seen in entertainment media, such as characters in a TV show or newscasters.
• Vicarious experiences: A related use and gratification for entertainment media is the idea of living through the characters portrayed and imagining ourselves in their lives by adopting the characters' perspectives.
• Downward social comparison: This use and gratification holds that we enjoy taking in media that portrays people similar or worse off than ourselves.
• Eudaimonic motivation: Media consumers also turn to entertainment media to search for deeper meanings, insights, purpose for life, finding beauty, raising morale, experience strong emotions, and understand how others think and feel.

ENTERTAINMENT & UTOPIA

Pure entertainment films: films that give you what you lack, utopian sensibilities, feelings of idealness.

- energy

- abundance

- intensity 

- transparency 

- community