Study On Uses And Gratifications Of Short Video Media For Rurual Elderly

Neil Polzman,a scholar from Media Environmental School,believes that the media is metaphor.For rural elderly people who have been regarded as "digital refugees" for a long time,the adoption of new media is also a metaphor for their needs of use.Different from the previous social media,short video,as a low-threshold,is spreading fast in rural areas.Rural elderly people adopting short video is not only a kind of media contact behavior at the individual level,but also a metaphor of the changes of the entire rural socio-economy,culture and population.From the perspective of the theory of "Uses and gratifications",this thesis selected M village which is located in Anhui Province,the central region of China as the study field and adopted in-depth interviews,participation observations and textual analysis methods.Studies have found that the uses of short video in rural areas originated from three levels of needs which are viewing,production and interaction.First of all,at the viewing level,the elderly in rural areas will watch short videos as a channel for acquiring knowledge skills,understanding news,and entertaining.Secondly,at the production level,the creation is based on the multiple functions of short video media,which not only meets various needs of rural elderly people such as recording,performance,beautification and publicity,but also expresses their self-identity in different spaces through the presentation of images.Finally,at the interactive level,the social attributes of short video media prompted rural elderly people to participate in the content-driving online interaction actively to meet the sense of sentiment,so as to re-discover the self-worth and enrich their life.However,this study also found that using short video media can not fully meet the gratifications of the elderly in rural areas due to the lack of media literacy and insufficient aging mechanism of platforms.Therefore,in the process of "active aging",not only should we further optimize the media functions and promote the media to update,but also to explore how to accelerate the development and bring more bonus to feed the elderly people of rural society through the development of new media technology,thereby promoting the realization of rural revitalization.