Comments on the readings

Based on the Lee (2013)’s article, news consumption in the contemporary media environment is not driven by the mutual exclusivity of news motivations. This is quite true if you think about, for example, Facebook; people use it both for social and information purposes.
It would also be interesting to see how the four motivations (information, entertainment, opinion and social) influence information processes; some motivation-triggered information might be retained in a brain storage longer than others or quicker to recall.  
Differences of motivation-driven news consumption may in turn influence civic engagement and other democratic practices, which are all positive outcomes. This might be true especially when examining the sample as a whole, the US adult news audiences were most driven to consume news for information purposes, and least driven to consume news for opinions: No hard cores. But what about negative outcomes? Will there be any negative outcomes caused by a certain motivation-driven news consumption? If so, what would it be?
There is another interesting journal article (Kim, J. (2014). Scan and click: The uses and gratifications of social recommendation systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 184-191) that links uses and gratifications theory to the use of social media’s social recommendation systems (SRS. e.g. “like” on Facebook). Based on this article, expression-seeking is the highest motivation for users to use the SRS, and that the more one spends on social media, the more he/she is likely to express opinions via SRS rather than read opinions; it naturally creates the influential, in other words, opinion leaders.