Beyond the Active/Passive Media Dichotomy

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Roger Cooper, who introduces the distinction between uses and gratifications (audiences are active and goal-directed, motivated to satisfy needs via media; analysis is on an individual level) and stuctural theories (audiences are passive and constrained, bound by availability, access, scheduling, and awareness of media - mainly TV - content; analysis is on the macro level).

There is a need to integrate both approaches, but how? First, nobody is simply active or passive - everyone is both, to varying degrees in various situations. Also, convergence weakens the influence of structure in the way it's been traditionally thought of; there is an abundance of media choices, and more control over them - media users increasingly employ search, ratings, links, and other ways of accessing content; they continue to function within constraints of time, cost, and access.

In post-convergence, users may now actively use structures to identify their preferences; structure can be active and does not imply lack of engagement. We must develop theory that encourages the integration of previously divergent theories; this convergence aligns with convergent tendencies in the media themselves. One approach to this is to see media users as active within structures, recognising the influence of structures on media choices, and the way users may even seek out structures to inform their content choices. This removes the active/passive discourse that stunts nuanced explanations of media use and behaviours.

(There's now a section in this talk which presents an unexplained statistical table that is utterly incomprehensible to me - I wish people/social scientists wouldn't do that.)

Ritualistic and instrumental motives predict the use of news Websites; bookmarks, search, and availability also act as predictors - using news sites is both a habitual and an information-seeking activity. Users may actively use structures to identify their preferences for media choices, even though (or because?) a plethora of choices are available to them. But what internal and external structures influence uses? How do key uses and gratifications concepts interact with structure? How can we balance micro- and macro-level analyses?

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