Why Communication Researchers Should Study the Internet: A Dialogue

“Much of the research has been carried out by followers of the uses and gratifications tradition, who anticipated the medium as an exemplar of active media selection that could further validate the core tenets of that paradigm (Morris & Ogan, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Ruggerio, 2000).”

“Since the advent of early forms of computer-mediated communication, scholars have suggested that digital communication differs in important ways from face-to-face communication (Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996; Thompson 1995; Walther and Parks 2002).”

“…a medium to its uses and effects also ignores what uses-and-gratifications research has demonstrated 12 repeatedly emphasized the relevance of people’s motives to explaining the consequences of the Internet, 5,12,13 but studies on online friendship formation have not yet adopted this perspective.”

“Owen (1997) wrote that “a functional definition of EBBs is to conceptualize an actual bulletin board” (p.”

“Rafaeli has laid out five central dimensions in which WWW-based communications are distinguished from traditional mass media (Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“Research on interactivity (Rafaeli, 1988; Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996; McMillan and Hwang, 2002; Sundar et al., 2003; Fortin and Dholakia, 2005) offers interesting insights for presence within social media contexts.”

“Using a scenariobased approach, an online experiment was conducted to test whether consumers perceive corporate and personal blogs to be credible sources of information”

“Especially in the case of Internet use, many researchers have claimed that the uses and gratifications approach could be a productive means for better understanding the relationship between individual users and technology in the era of the Internet (e.g., Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“…approach when studying internet use, examining the multitudes of needs fulfilled by the internet, such as entertainment, social contact, escapism, and information gathering (Kaye & Johnson, 2002; LaRose & Eastin, 2004; Morris & Ogan, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Papacharissi & Rubin, 2000).”

“The study adopts the uses-and-gratifications perspective, which is traditionally thought of as a valuable lens through which to examine Internet communication (Morris & Ogan, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“The Internet has been touted as a new medium with radically different properties from traditional mass media (Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“In fact, from its early days, researchers have applied UGT to explain internet usage (Morris and Ogan, 1996; Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996; Charney and Greenberg, 2001; Flanagin and Metzger, 2001).”

“A number of scholars have explicated the concept of interactivity, although sometimes under different labels within the context of theories of social presence, media richness theory, media synchronicity, and interpersonal deception (e.g., Buller & Burgoon, 1996; Dennis & Valacich, 1999; Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Newhage…”

“It would also seem to be important for researchers to consider the different uses of the various media and the sorts of gratifications (Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996) sought by users of print versus online media.”

“Ruggiero joins the call by Newhagen and Rafaeli (1996) to employ U&G theory as an important asset in the toolbox of internet research.”

“…set of affordances for journalists, namely instantaneity, multimodality, interactivity, and hypertextuality (Bardoel & Deuze, 2001; Deuze, 2003; Domingo, 2005; MedieKultur 54 Article: The mediatization of journalism Aske Kammer Hall, 2001; Kammer, 2013; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Salaverría, 2005).”

“Several observers suggested that new technologies defy easy categorization as either interpersonal or mass media channels because of their interactive nature (Gumpert & Cathcart, 1986; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; O’Sullivan, 1999, 2005; Pingree et al. 1988; Reardon & Rogers, 1988).”

“These participants who are CMC apprehensive may also be technophobic and simply less likely to interact with computers and the Internet, preventing them from developing any level of perceived technological self-efficacy.”

“Other scholars (e.g., Morris & Ogan, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996) have also suggested that uses and gratifications is a proper lens through which to examine Internet-based communication, and several scholars have used the theory to study Internet users over the past decade.”

“It is expensive to produce and cheap to reproduce [Bates 1989; Shapiro and Varian 1999].”

“U&G television research has, in fact, been widely adapted for consumer Internet use studies [11], [31], [34], but this research has generally used measures developed in previous television studies.”

“Computer-mediated communication (CMC) research has grown dramatically as a field since the seminal contributions that launched the area into prominence (Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976; Walther, 1996).”

“Uses and gratifications (UG) has been widely used for the study of new media technologies [2, 3] to explain how people use media by examining their motivations.”

“The ‘Uses & Gratifications’ (U&G) research tradition focuses on factors influencing motives for use and outcomes for people’s media-related behaviour (Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“Uses and gratification theory (UGT) supports this conception and is not new in internet context in fact; researchers applied UGT to explain internet usage from its early days [30-33].”

“This research is grounded in the uses-and-gratifications perspective (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974), which is traditionally thought of as the proper lens through which to examine Internet communication (Morris & Ogan, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“In this vein, Newhagen and Rafaeli (1996) mentioned that it is reasonable that researchers apply the uses and gratifications theory as an effective framework to understand Internet user behavior.”

“This has led some researchers to argue that the very nature of Web content tests the limits of positivist methodological and epistemological postulates (e.g., Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“12 This result fits the media richness theory (Daft and Legel 1984; 1986) and the usual narrative of the evolution of the Internet (Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996; Morris and Ogan 1996): While bandwidth grew, the traditional dominance of text was continuously being replaced by images and audio content,…”

“Another reason is that the internet can provide highly tailored content to users according to their preferences because it can be customized to a great extent (Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996).”

“…author at the Department of Speech, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2560 Campus Rd, Honlolulu, HI, 96822, USA; Tel: (808) 956-3323; Fax: 808 -956-3947; E-mail: jangkim@hawaii.edu 1 The Internet is also changing the consumers’ purchasing behavior from the traditional retail shopping to e-commerce.”

“According to Newhagen (1996) these include (especially in synchronous CMC via Internet)”

“The use of these associated communication technologies heightens student involvement and strengthens individual technological and scientific knowledge and abilities while providing students with an opportunity to gain a firm grasp of engineering principles behind the technologies (Newhagen, 1996).”

“Such actions involve deliberate decisions and open a vast new field of study of people’s uses and gratifications (Ruggiero, 2000; Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996).”

“Interactivity has been considered as instrumental in differentiating between successful and failing Web sites [26], and beneficial for online firms to build a good relationship with their customers [14].”

“2.1 Content Analysis of Websites The complex mix of old and new features of websites makes the medium a challenge for web content analysts (Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“…Limited 1468-4527 DOI 10.1108/14684521011024164 D ow nl oa de d by K un gl ig a T ek ni sk a H ög sk ol an A t 1 2: 00 3 0 Ja nu ar y 20 16 ( PT ) customised to a great extent, it can provide highly tailored content to users according to their idiosyncratic preferences (Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996).”

“When the internet was first introduced to the general public, in the 1990s, scholars stated that the U&G perspective is applicable for internet research because of the mutability and interactive nature of the web (December, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“By tailoring data based on interests, users are only presented relevant content (Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996).”

“Several scholars have suggested that the psychological theory, Uses and Gratifica-tion (U&G), is a relevant approach to explaining the use of new media technologies, in this case CMC (Morris and Ogan 1996, Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996, Wright 2002).”

“Internet users can experience animation, pictures, text, video, virtual reality, and voice and receive messages combing animated images, writing, voices, and sounds (Newhagen & Rafaeli, 2006).”

“이러한 맥락에서 상호작용성에 대 한 연구는 크게 상호작용을 가능하게 하는 매체 및 커뮤니케이션의 기능에 관한 연구(Massey & Levy, 1999; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Rice, 1984; Rogers, 1986)와 커뮤니케이션에 참여하는 개인이 인지하는 상호작용성에 관한 연구(McMillan, 2000; Newhagen, 1998; Wu, 2000) 분야로 나누어볼 수 있다.”

“We adapted our 3-item scale for advertising relevance from personal relevance (Bures, Amundsen, Abrami, 2002; Campbell & Wright, 2008) and advertising interactivity (Hoffman & Novak, 1996; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Steuer, 1992) literature.”

“Such appreciation is also one type of incentive gratification or reward described by Newhagen and Rafaeli (1996) .”

“…to incorporate the ways in which technology shapes and is shaped by human life, the Internet has been largely acknowledged by many new media scholars as bringing new freedoms, democracy, and increased opportunities to society at large (DiMaggio et al., 2001; Newhagen & Rafaeli, 1996; Pavlik, 2008).”