Absract

This paper examines the digital divide in social media prosumption.  It compares college students’ and general population’s prosumption behavior in social media and proposes a set of measures of prosumption in online media settings with special emphasis on social media including prosumption proclivity, production intensity, and a prosumption index which can be used in future studies on social media and other user-generated content sites. We classified prosumption behavior in a quadrant of four main types along the two dimensions of production and consumption. A polarized trend of prosumption was observed. Prosumption proclivity is a much stronger facilitator of social media consumption than participation or production intensity especially among college students.

Key Words: Social Media, Prosumption, Participation, Digital Divide,

                      Media Consumption, User-generated content. 

^JCMRJournal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2014, 45 – 62 

©Delmas Communications Ltd.

About the authors

*Dr. Louisa Ha is a professor and the Chair in the Department of Telecommunications, School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, U.S.A.  She is also an associate editor of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She is the founder and chair of the Emerging Media Research Cluster in the School of Media and Communication.

**Dr. Gi Woong Yun is an associate professor and undergraduate coordinator  in the Department of Telecommunications, School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, U.S.A. His research interests are mostly about Internet as media. He works on social psychological theories of communication, online social media, Internet research methodology and more.

Full Article

Words: 7,916; Pages: 24