CHANGE IN AUDIENCE STUDIES: FROM USES AND GRATIFICATIONS TO ADDICTION

The communications tradition began to form during years of upheaval in the first half of the 20th century and it grew in means of content and fields of practice, at pace with the developments in communication technologies. under the shadow of the world wars, studies of the first era debated various aspects of media effects over the concept of propaganda; the 1960’ies gave precedence to the audience at the expense of media effects. with time, the importance attributed to audience demands and likings was criticized which led to an attempt to explain -in an empirical tradition- audience attitudes in a new kind of relation. while uses and gratifications research was going on, the media and audience relationship opened to itself a new field around the asymmetric concept of addiction. arising within the uses and gratifications tradition, the media addiction model built its own tradition in parallel with the changes in communication technologies. soon, many media effects and uses and gratifications research began from the perspective of addiction. by focusing on the transition stages from the uses and gratifications model to media addiction, our aim was to shed light on the developments in media studies in relation to changes in social systems and technological progress.