General Live Streaming Services Lead to New Uses and Gratifications

Abstract

The uses and gratifications theory focus on the question, “What do people do with media?” instead of “What do media do to people." Most prior gratifications researchers have concentrated on gratifications motivated by social and psychological needs. However, with the development of technology and the advent of Web 2.0, the results of early gratifications research might not cover the gratifications arising in the new digital age. So Sundar and Limperos developed an hypothesis stating that new technologies can create new gratifications, which include modality-based gratifications, agency-based gratifications, interactivity-based gratifications and navigability-based gratifications [1]. Therefore, on the basis of uses and gratifications theory, this paper seeks to explore the four types of new gratifications above taken from the general live streaming service platform DOUYU in China.