Interpersonal Communication in Social Networking Sites: An Investigation in the Framework of Uses and Gratification Theory

In the twenty-first century, thanks to the development of information and communication technologies that, communication possibilities between people is getting unlimited. People can reach and follow anyone as whenever they want. Especially, after the development of web 2.0 which ensures interactive communication, social media has become much dominant in people’s lives. The social media is valuable for people to create social networks and sustain their relations, also protects the communication between them. Therefore, it has a fundamental place in people’s lives. Renckstorf and his friends (1996) evaluated the media usage of the people in the base of social interaction, and they created the model which is named Media Use as Social Action/MASA. The MASA model clarifies the people’s media usage as a social movement. In addition, according to MASA, people use the media for their self-wants and self-needs. In this regard, people use the media for interpersonal communication purposes in four ways. These purposes are, getting information, doing cooperation, having relation, expressing and explaining and strategical use (Petric et al. 2011). In this work, people’s aim of the using social media, especially for the aim of interpersonal communication, is explained in the base of theories. Also, in this paper, the results are evaluated that obtained from structured interviews based on the classification of MASA model, and thus, it is aimed to clarify which communication purposes do the people use the social network sites. When the results of research are evaluated in terms of Uses and Gratification theory which concerns on what people do with the media more than the effect of media on people, users of social network sites indicate that social network sites are characterized by informational-cooperative, relational-socialization, expressive, strategic, and four-dimensionality, but are responsive to the need for a large number of interpersonal communication.