Social uses of interpersonal communication technologies in a complex media environment

This article investigates the patterns of social use of interpersonal communication technologies that can be discerned in today’s complex media environment, in which people have many channels available for interpersonal communication. The article starts with a comprehensive review of the comparative uses and gratification research of interpersonal communication media. It argues that these studies are efficient in answering questions such as why one device is preferred over another, but the approach they take is less suitable for an analysis of the patterns of actual use of interpersonal communication devices. While they build on various typologies of motives for media use, based upon psychological theories of motivations and needs, this article proposes that a valid typology of actual social uses of interpersonal media should be based on a social action theory in order to find general patterns of social use of interpersonal communication devices. Hence, this article follows recent developments of the uses and gratification approach which suggest treating social use as a social action and finds a fruitful starting point in Habermas’s typology of social action. From this, a typology of social uses of communication devices is derived, allowing a general and comprehensive, yet condensed empirical insight into the social uses of contemporary interpersonal communication technologies within a nationwide sample. Using various statistical techniques, an assessment is made of how five communication channels (i.e. mobile phone, short text messages, telephone, face-to-face and the Internet) are employed for four social uses, i.e. informational-cooperative, strategic, relational and expressive.