Uses and Gratifications Theory: the media power

By Daniel Gomez

Every single day and every word you say

Every game you play

Every night you stay, I'll be watching you

Oh can't you see you belong to me?

- The Police. Every breath you take

Companies use the people flow of knowledge and information as raw materials for the process of creation and commercialization than make the products profitable to these business. But people don’t use media for nothing, as Uses and Gratification theory say, social and psychological characteristics motivate the need for media. My thesis supports that whether the companies and Centers of Power need information of people to reach their economic or political goals and people provide this information because they need to do activities that generate it (Uses and Gratifications theory), people are able to control better the world around them if they have more control of the information they give.

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”. This sentence can be read in the book 1984 written by George Orwell. In this story the world is a totalitarian society led by Big Brother, which censors everyone’s behavior, even their though myth of the Big Brother. Since the apparition of the Internet and the new information technologies and devices, many people have the belief that our society has become in something like in Orwell’s book. The network society in the Information Age provides people of being connected and sharing knowledge beyond the geographic and physical boundaries. This knowledge and information can be used in many ways if some organization has access to it. According to Andrejevic in the book iSpy, surveillance and power in the interactive media, this new linked society makes that “companies are able to track our movements, transactions, and communication without permissions, or in many cases, knowledges” (Andrejevic 2007:4). The use of the new technology devices hides “behind the scenes and screens the little access to the form of information collection and circulation” that we really have. The myth of interactivity has being taken as this that will improve our feeling of freedom, but it has not been well examined. This term, interactivity, “is an illdefined and slippery one that has been used to include everything from staying in constant contact with friends, family and relatives to votes for our favorite “american Idol”” (Andrejevic at al. 2007). Otherwise, Uses and Gratification Theory exposes that people interactivity concept is to take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their ows lives.

However, human being is a social animal, and communication is the best tool to this socialization. According to Mental Research Institute researcher Paul Watzlawick, the first basic axiom in his theory on communication that is necessary to have a functioning communication between two individuals is that “one cannot not communicate”. Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate. Therefore, when people is using Internet as Interactive way of socialization, they spread amounts of information about themselves that is impossible to control entirely. It makes that a company only has to harvest the grains these “Hansel and Gretel” that we have become when we are surfing. It is obvious that those grains is a metaphor of the knowledge that we drop in every process of communication- every behavior, according to Watzlawick-.

Network society has changed our way of life. The new linked cities that emerge this century have made changes in the behavior of people and the administration of time, specially in big cities, than concentrates the most of the population of the world. In a mixture of the augmentation of the individualism in all terms and the rise of the leisure time as a new business forms. According to the Media dependency Theory, a theory considered as an extension of Uses and gratifications theory, the audience goals are the origin of the dependence and that the more dependent an individual is on the media for to fulfill needs, such a person choose the more essential media to him or her and it is opposite to Andrejevic thesis where “the deployment of the promise of interactivity in commercial and political context underwrites participation in top-down forms of management and control rather than in democratic self-governance” (Andrejevic 2007: 51). My point of view about this discussion is that in a democratic system where the companies are so worried about the opinion and behavior of the customer rather than to control the way of thinking and the obsession of the politicians to lead the people to vote them, is a political system where citizen have more power than they really know. The Big Brother can hide the manipulation of the information, can have the track of our movements, transactions and tastes as Andrejevic argues. But they will always depend of the actions of the producers of the information. So in my opinion the Big Brother is afraid of changes of users, and people can share the sufficient information to be warned. We can not forget that people get the information that they wants in internet: when you are writing your profile in Facebook and you have to fill the part of “Musical Tastes”. Nobody makes you to write “Nirvana” or “Tchaikovsky”, you give the information you consider necessary.

Anyway, it is obvious that my point of view is not very useful to this kind of information we give in eCommerce, purchasing any product via Internet. The problem is not to give your credit card number but to provide with the information about what do you like or not. I like more fiction books, but when I am working in an article, Amazon database knows perfectly what kind of books I need, specially after the first purchase. It means that the people have the final control of clicking or not on the mouse left button, so we cannot talk about totalitarian system, but we must always remember that all that we do is observed and processed always in a communication act. In the current network society the tools to get people information are multiplied thanks to the interactivity of new media. Interactivity is a term very confused that refers to a feedback between consumers and producer, transmitters and receivers. According to Andrejevic, this interactivity raises the differences between power and the rest and there is not a power sharing, only a widely participation of consumers that are continually observed in commercial and political context. Otherwise, Uses and Gratifications Theory states that these people are just filling a need and the price is the “accidental” donation of information. My opinion is that people can control the information they give while they are filling these needs and this control of information can change the movements of the power, so, people belongs to themselves. Nowadays, with the flow of information, the theory of Big Brother has no sense, because they are not slaves and they are not ignorant. We can share information with many people and to contrast all of it. Democratic nations have free access to share the information, and the same companies while they are hiding people information manipulation sometimes forget that axiom that say “you cannot not communicate”.

References:

• Andrejevic, Mark (2007) iSpy, surveillance and Power in the interactive media. USA: University of Kansas
• Watlzawick, Weakland and Fisch), (1974) Change, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.