#gratifications

thank you, universe, for helping my friends fall in love and be genuinely happy. may they never let what others have to say get to them; let them feel free to do and act as they please. may tonight be super fun and exciting for everyone who is going to join our game night and may the rest of the month and the rest of the year be atleast enough for everyone. here’s to a really lovely weekend!

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This week’s blog is about audiences as agents, which is people that have agency. Uses and gratifications sees the audience as active, selective, discriminating, self-aware. Uses and gratifications purposes that the audience members actively choose media channels and content to suit their own needs at a particular moment. It takes an essentially functional perspective on audience activity. When using the term functional, that is explaining the terms that were previously listed about uses and gratifications and making functional choices about what the audience members want to achieve in their audience activity. There five criteria that can further help with understanding uses and gratifications. One of those five criteria is that mass media compete with other sources of need satisfaction. For example, if you were looking to relax you could watch TV, play a video game, or have a conversation with a friend. Uses and gratifications is about conscious choice. Unconscious effects are often researched separately, but it is important to point out that conscious choice and unconscious effects are not necessarily two separate things and they can go together. The example used in the highlight video about Blumer: choice and effect is about a boy who was using movies to gain insight very consciously about romance. A real-life example that I have about this subject is watching NHL games to further improve my own hockey skills. As a hockey player I always wanted to get better and would train for hours everyday to improve my skill, endurance, and strength. One thing that you cannot learn from training though, is certain things that the professionals do. The professionals are in the NHL for a reason and so I began watching games extremely attentively so that I could learn little aspects of the game that I did not know. These little aspects can include things like certain movements the players make when they skate, with their arms, head, stick, and legs. Another thing could be how players move around to open areas of the ice so that the player on their own team with the puck can have available options to pass the puck. These are all things that I payed close attention too and was determined to do so that I could take what I learned and apply it to my own game. Herzog’s research asked women who listened to serial radio, why they listen. The three answers that were listed were “as emotional release”, “to engage in wishful thinking – fantasize – draw on the successes of the radio characters”, and “as a source of advice”. This is showing that consciousness of seeking out certain kind of content and learning from that content. “The shift from questions of widespread media influence to those regarding the utility of the media for individual viewers heralded an early shift toward a uses-oriented view of audience experience” (Sullivan). Another real-life example that I have connected to this is the certain accounts that I follow on Instagram. I am someone who is very invested in fitness and healthy living. So, rather than choosing to follow meme accounts and certain profiles that will provide no knowledgeable information, I choose to follow workout accounts, healthy eating accounts, and body rehabbing accounts. All of these accounts will provide a different aspect of information which will all intertwine into the idea of healthy living. The workout videos will motivate me to workout, and a lot of the time I find new workouts that I can do myself when at the gym or even at home. The healthy eating accounts post recipes for healthy and delicious meals that I can easily make myself. Eating healthy is one of the most important aspects to living a healthy lifestyle. The body rehabbing accounts help me learn new ways that I can stretch, massage, and rehab my body when I am feeling sore or after I injure something. Without these accounts I would probably still be in pain in certain areas that I have injured in the past. Thankfully, I have mastered taking care of my body and I have to give a lot of the credit to these Instagram accounts that I follow. This real-life example is connected to media as functional. Media as functional includes things like gratification sought, gratification obtained, instrumental, ritualized, structural, and relational. These are all aspects of using media to fulfill needs such as surveillance (watching the world around us in what we are consuming), correlation (the content we are consuming helps us to understand what goes with what), entertainment, and the opportunity to socialize. “Our needs usually emerge only when more prepotent needs have been gratified” (Maslow, p.115). A concept that I found interesting from this week’s lessons was the MAIN acronym. The ‘M’ stands for modality-based gratification, which refers to the different methods of presentation (audio or pictures) of media content, appealing to different aspects of the human perceptual system (hearing and seeing). The ‘A’ stands for agency-based gratifications, which is the gratification of being agents or sources of information. The ‘I’ stands for interactivity-based gratifications which allows the user to make real-time changes to the content in the medium and allows users to interact with and through the medium. The last letter of the acronym is ‘N’ which stands for navigability-based gratifications. Navigability-based gratifications are the ability to freely move around online, fine one’s way, do what one wants to do, and find one’s way back.

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#Prioritize #Gratifications Your body, mind & spirit will thank you! • #SPEAKROC #SPIRIT • #PURPOSE • #CONVICTION (at Planet Roc)