Fellas! We’re back to the blog post and it’s headache time again. This time for this blog post, we’re gonna discuss about the uses and gratification model.
Two interesting questions. The first question is, why we do feel pain when we accidentally bite our tongue, but we don’t when we do it intentionally? Don’t know who discovered it but he/she’s probably a genius. The second question, why are you biting your tongue right now?
Ok sharing is over, let’s get to the topic now~ Let’s start it by knowing the meaning of uses and gratification model. Unlike other theories that focus on the effects of media towards people, the uses and gratification theory, also known as UGT, focuses on what do people do with media. From internet sources, UGT is an audience-centred approach to understanding why and how people satisfy their specific needs via specific media. For an example, just like horror movies or shows, people are not tied up and forced to watch and scared by the horror scenes, they choose to watch them to achieve their satisfaction either in curiosity or their desire to experience fear. In short, UGT is the theory where the audience are active and use media to satisfy them.
Some individuals use media as a tool to propaganda their beliefs and this may evolved into serious problems. Take an example which happened just few weeks ago, the ‘Invading Area 51’ issue. Maybe some of you guys don’t know much about area 51 so I’ll just explain briefly. Area 51 is an America air force base which was believed by most of the people to have aliens captured and kept in there. This all starts from a Facebook user Smyleekun, he raised an activity on Facebook named ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us’ after a live broadcast related to area 51 issue was published on Youtube.
Yeah it sounds ridiculous, but what’s more ridiculous is that almost 1.5 million people responded going in this activity! Including me! The description of the activity is also so silly which I’ll attached it below. This definitely caught the America Air Force’s attention, and they strictly warned them not to do shitty and stupid things like this. Of course the founder of this activity also said that this is just a prank, don’t take it serious.
And for me it’s like
As we can see, at first this was just a joke, some kind of meme prank activity, but it gained so much attention after that, imagine what will happen if bad intention is added into it. Lots and lots of people are using media to propaganda their beliefs either in a funny way or a serious way. Media has a lot of things which are interesting or sound reasonable, but we must always remain rational or else we will easily get subjected and controlled by the others.
I think this is the end of my blog post. This blog post is slightly different from before. Indeed it is still tough but the area 51 meme really makes my research interesting! That’s all and thanks for your reading, hope that one day I’ll have the chance to go there and free the aliens~
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