Psycho-social and cultural dimensions to media access

In the article, “Avoiding computer: Does personality play a role?” Finn and Korukonda’s (2003), argue that investigations into understanding the reasons for Internet use should track back to antecedent conditions such as personality traits in evaluating the role of socio-psychological origins of needs within the Uses and Gratification perspective. Their findings, however, did not conclusively prove any association between personality traits such as neuroticism, extraversion, and psychoticism. (I personally feel that Digman, 1989, 1990, classification of five personality traits is a better reflection of personality traits than Eysenck, 1991, three personality traits. p. 77.) and Internet use. It is my view that diffusion of innovation might provide a better framework to understand the reasons why people do not use the Internet even though they might have technological access and content access. According to the Diffusion of Innovation theory, the characteristic of the innovation affects their rate of adoption. Rogers, 1995, has identified it as
Relative Advantage- the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes
Compatibility- the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters
Complexity-the degree to which an innovation is difficult to understand
Trialability-the degree to which an innovation might be experimented with on a limited basis.
Observability-the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others (p. 15-16.)
My contention is, instead of having an inward perspective into personality traits (of which there can be innumerable at any given point in time) an outward perception of the advantages of the innovation (Internet) would be a better route into gaining insights into the reasons for the use or disuse of Internet. This line of reasoning is also consistent with the information gathered from exploratory interviews as part of The LaGrange Public Internet Initiative discussed in the article “Reducing barriers to access via public information infrastructure: The LaGrange Public Internet Initiative. The African-American male in the interview used the LITV for searching information as opposed to sending e-mails (relative advantage), the Caucasian women in her late 60’s subscribed to LITV because it was less complex than using the computer (complexity), the father in a family of four used LITV because his past experiences with computer at work was positive (compatibility) (p.147-148).
In addition, the first of Carnegie Mellon University HomeNet studies that considered relationship between two personality dimensions and Internet use-social extraversion and innovativeness did not account for significant differences in Internet use even after controlling for demographic characteristic or socio-economic. Furthermore, in the second HomeNetToo project, relationships between the five personality factors and Internet use (John, 1990) did not conclusively predict any strong association between personality dimension and needs satisfied by the Internet. (p. 162). These results suggest that we should be looking in a different direction to account for Internet use and the Uses and Gratification theory and the theory of Diffusion of Innovation may prove to be more robust platforms for explaining Internet use when controlled for media access—both technological and content access. (Please note I am not arguing against Uses and Gratification theory earlier but just against the antecedent factor of the socio-psychological origin to the needs.).
On a final note, the article on Social and Psychological Influences on Computer User Frustration as a theory wasn’t to compelling since frustration is not uniquely related to Internet usage alone and could involve any number of other media usage for instance trying to figure out how to use the different remote controls for the DVD player, the TIVO, The satellite TV and the audio system all hooked together. Moreover, their schematic representation of the frustration model would have made better sense if represented thus:








Incident factors
Goal commitment
Self-Efficacy
Importance
Individual factors
Computer
Anxiety and Attitudes



Productive Progress

Severity of Interruption
Time Loss
Goal Interruption
Cultural Influence
Societal Influence
Learning
Mood
Psychological Factors
Strength of Desire
Anticipation
Expectation
Frustration


Frustration Model
References:
Rogers, E. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed., New York: Free Press.

John, O. P. (1990). The Big Five factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires, In L.Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality theory and research. (p.261-275). New York: Guilford.