The Uses, Needs, & Satisfaction of Media- I present you mini literature review of social media and how it has affected every aspect of how we view the world. How does it continue to thrive everyday? Let's take this large subject and narrow to our everyday needs. What void does media fill? What kinds of repercussions will that cause in our ability to perform tasks and make decisions left and right? Let's explore!

The behavior, cognitive, biological, environmental events, and other personal factors make up the social cognitive model that explain the general symbolization, forethought, evaluative, self-regulation, reflective self-consciousness, and symbolic communication that make us human. People process and transform experiences into judgement and actions. They self-regulate their motivations, standards, goals, and evaluations to their own behavior. The search for knowledge and skills rely directly on experiences. People act on their image of reality and we learn by observing. Attentional, representational, behavioral, and motivational processes select, remember, and compare information that generate our behavior. Media portrayal can alter the construction of our realities and specific model characteristics that are more stimulating can also influence our behavior. Gao & Feng (2016) looked at the uses and gratification for social media and blog users and found reasons why we use media.Looking at the uses and gratification of social and psychological origins of needs, generating expectations of mass media, and the differential patterns of media exposure. Typology studies propose self-report as one of the main methods for media consumption. Individuals might not be conscious of this or other techniques for consumption but they pick and choose certain media for gratification.Information seeking: Social media have more than ever lowered the barriers to sharing information. The networking features allow users to receive information from sources they trust and find interesting. People increasingly use social media to learn about news and events, to obtain recommendations about products and content, and to seek health advice and even online diagnoses, People use social media to learn how to make sense of things for just about any subject.

Entertainment: Another major use of social media is for entertaining oneself. By browsing interesting content shared by others, sharing others’ life experiences, and spreading gossip, people can vent negative feelings, escape from problems, and fill time

Social interaction: Social media constitute a primary venue for young people to exchange social support, to maintain existing relationships, and to meet new friends. Users can interact with each other by sharing content, commenting on or reposting others’ content, marking others’ content with “favorite” or “like it,” and messaging others directly. Within existing social groups, people use social media to enhance connectedness and develop common ground

Self-expression: People use social media to share information about themselves and to show who they are and what they like. Such self-expressive behaviors are associated with a self-verification motive to present one’s true self to the outside world, to confirm an established self-concept, and to maintain consistency in self-knowledge. In addition, self-expression is a necessary step for people to create an identity, which is critical for obtaining peer acceptance and exchanging social support.

Impression management: A number of studies found that social media users present their personal information deliberately to give others a positive impression of them. Some users intentionally employ social media to develop social relationships and promote self-status. Such self-enhancement behaviors are associated with the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem (Gao, Feng, 2016)

Using a combination of demographic information, activity records, and network properties the researched clustered YouTube users into five groups: small community members, content producers, content consumers, producers and consumers, and others. Underwood et al. (2011) argued that people use social media either for broadcasting information about themselves or communicating with others. They classified Facebook users into three groups—broadcaster, communicator, and high interaction—based on users’ responses to a questionnaire capturing the nature of their Facebook activities. (Gao, Feng, 2016) Knowing the type of demographic groups and its relationship to why they use media helps to understand why this kind of communication is so popular. I just wonder what kinds of specific media is getting more attention and popularity than others. Instagram has been one of the fastest growing platforms in the last 3 years making it one of the most influential image sharing sites of all time. My next question is what is Instagram and how does it excel in social media? According to Zappavigna (2016) Instagram may be classed a social networking service since it allows users to create a personal profile and ‘following’ relationships with other users. These relationships are asymmetrical as users are not required to reciprocate. Most social networking services have in common a number of basic functions: profile creation, the ability to generate a list of affiliated users, privacy customization, and a mechanism for viewing the activities of affiliated users (boyd, 2010). These affiliated users are often referred to as ‘friends’ (e.g. Facebook friends) or ‘followers’ (e.g. Twitter followers). boyd (2010) suggests that social networking services have a number of characteristic attributes: persistence (capture and archiving of content), replicability (duplication of content), scalability (broad visibility of content) and searchability (access to content via search). As a social networking service, Instagram is a vehicle for photo distribution and Instagram images an example of Jenkins et al.’s (2013) concept of ‘spreadable media’, that is, media which is shared by audiences for their own purposes within participatory cultures. (Zappavigna, 2016)

How does social media continue to expand it’s values? Social media needs innovative techniques to pull in and maintain the use from it’s viewers. People who have acquired skills in reaching large audiences are keen on swaying the direction of public opinion in one way or another. How are social media users developing new ways of attracting attention? Zolkepli (2015) researched how people adopt to social media and what techniques are needed for social media to attract to people: Her research is designed to empirically investigate how social media needs and innovation influence the adoption of social media amongst Internet users. Overall, the findings suggest that social media adoption is significantly driven by three types of need category – personal (consisting of enjoyment and entertainment), social (consisting of social influence and interaction) and tension release (consisting of belongingness, companionship, playfulness). In turn, these needs are motivated by the social media innovation characteristics (relative advantage, observability, compatibility) that increase the likelihood of the adoption. The research makes a significant contribution in the area of media and technology adoption, which can be used to help marketers understand the factors that motivate social media usage. (Zolkepli, 2015)

Q. Gao, C. Feng (2016) Branding with social media: User gratifications, usage patterns, and brand message content strategies, Computers in Human Behavior Volume 63, Pages 868–890 I. A Zolkepli, Y. Kamarulzaman (2015),Social media adoption: The role of media needs and innovation characteristics, Computers in Human Behavior, (43)189-209 M. Zappavigna (2016), Social media photography: construing subjectivity in Instagram images, Visual Communication