journal of digital research & publishing - The Sydney eScholarship ...

1 P M J O U R N A L O F D I G I T A L R ESEARCH & P UBLISHING
blogs, Facebook status updates, video streaming – provides a ‘hypertrophy of memory,
which can cause the incapacity of people to select and give importance to what they record’.
The content published on these sites often gives cause for questioning. Yet, information
about personal relationships, for example, features frequently on Facebook news feeds.
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exposing content to unintended audiences. Others purposely leave access open despite
privacy standards required to ‘encourage safe participation’ (Strater and Richter 2007
p.157) in these sites. The point of self­disclosure, after all, is to invite the audience into the
private sphere.
As Strater and Richter (2007) point out, ‘the disclosure of personal information…
support[s] online popularity and perceived social attractiveness’ (p.57). So, users make
choices in disclosing private information in order to establish themselves in a certain
position in a social setting, in this case social networking user­generated sites.
Alternatively, Taddeo (2009) claims that people ‘seem to lose the difference between
public and private spheres of memory...even between what must be remembered [or
published] and what not’ (p.130). This implies the use of UGM technologies causes people
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Claims like these base themselves on the assumption that human beings’ actions are
governed by a particular force within them, often labelled the ‘mind’. This argument is
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also takes choice away from a person and, along with it, their accountability for the choices
they make (Spillane 2006).
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media. According to U&G, people choose a medium based on the likelihood of it meeting
their ‘needs’ (Blumler and Katz 1974). The majority of the documentation reviewed for this
paper was based on the U&G model.
U&G is a psychological communication perspective that proposes that ‘active audiences
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and psychological factors that affect media selection and use’ (Rubin 1994). Its main
objectives focus on the correlation between media and ‘needs satisfaction’; understanding
the motives behind media behaviour; and identifying the functions or consequences
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