Immediate Media: How Instant Gratification, Self-Control, and the Expansion of Media Choice Affect our Everyday Lives.

Abstract

Explosive growth over the last two decades in the amount of options available to media users prompts researchers examining media choice to consider how media selection behavior has changed as well as how researchers' theories and methods should change to suit an era of convergent, high-choice media. This dissertation combines research on media choice with behavioral economic theories of choice to develop hypotheses and methods for assessing media choice in the new media choice environment. It examines the impact of one attribute of the media user – self-control – and two defining attributes of the new media choice landscape – the increasing number of options available and the extent to which media experiences are made available immediately before consumption – on media users’ tendencies to select immediately gratifying options. A survey study examining the correlations among self-control, media-related guilt, several types of leisure media use, and amount of time spent on schoolwork within an undergraduate population suggests that social networking sites and online video present college students with immediately gratifying temptations that can, in the case of online video, detract from time spent on schoolwork. A randomized, controlled experiment shows that users are more likely to select less immediately gratifying options, in particular news, when selecting from small set of options than when selecting from large set. A field observation study shows that students are more likely to plan less immediately gratifying media use, in particular school-related use, than they are to plan more immediately gratifying media use. Together, these findings suggest that abundant, immediately gratifying media options test the self-control of users, that users can stop themselves from selecting these options by planning their media use, and that subtle changes to the media choice environment, such as the number of options presented to users, can have large effects on choice behavior.