Uses and Gratifications for the World Wide Web

It has always been important to understand what motivates consumers to use the Internet, since network use is a critical precursor to electronic commerce (Eighmey & McCord, 1998; Lohse & Spiller, 1998; Schonberg, Cofino, Hoch, Podlaseck & Spraragen, 2000). Without Internet use, there is no e-commerce use; this is much the same sort of issue that retailers study when trying to determine issues that motivate store visits. Internet use motivations, then, serve an important purpose in the understanding of e-commerce activities (Stafford, 2003b). Technically speaking, the Internet has always been a communication medium, so we understand much of its functionality from the standpoint of its telecommunications utility. As we strive to understand motivations for its use, it is important to realize that the Internet is far more than a computer network; as the Internet evolves to become not only a telecommunications network, but also a consumer entertainment source, it gains the potential uses of familiar entertainment and communications media such as telephones, radio and television. The Internet remains a network for the distribution of information and telecommunications services, but it also becomes a channel for the delivery of other, richer media. In this sense, it has become a medium of media, or meta-medium (Stafford, Stafford & Shaw, 2002). Thus, where understanding the motivations related to computer use once was sufficient to diagnose Internet user motivations, we must now consider a wider range of potential uses and motivating gratifications arising from use of this complex and rich medium. Early work on the uses and gratifications for Internet use centered on the process of using the network and the gratifications related to the content that the network provided. However, recent work indicates that additional motivations exist for Internet use, and these are important for site and service operators to understand, if they wish to successfully motivate customer use of and loyalty to their resource. These new motivations are potential differentiators between operators within the Internet medium as well as between the Internet and conventional promotional media (Stafford, Stafford & Shaw, 2002). BACKGROUND