Audience Motivations and the Use of Social Media

I think that Lee (2013) made an important contribution to the uses and gratifications theory, as she showed that different types of people have different types of news motivations, and the latter can predict the consumption of different news genres. Put differently, she offered useful answers to the questions: who is using what type of news, and why? I was somewhat surprised that information motivations did not strongly predict the use of Twitter and that compared with Facebook it was consistently used more among those with entertainment, opinion and social motivations. Has this possibly changed since the study was conducted? A recent study by Pew (2015) suggested that "the proportion of users who say they follow breaking news on Twitter… is nearly twice as high as those who say they do so on Facebook (59% vs. 31%) – lending support, perhaps, to the view that Twitter’s great strength is providing as-it-happens coverage and commentary on live events". The study also suggested that on both Twitter and Facebook, more users are getting news than in the past.As Webster (2014) pointed out, various theoretical approaches assume that people have preexisting preferences that they bring to the media and this drives their choices. However, these approaches "allow very little room for the possibility that our encounters with media have other causes and that those encounters might actually shape our preferences, reversing the traditional direction of causation" (p. 14). I am wondering if and how our encounters with social media have shaped our preferences.