Before I try a new restaurant, I open REDnote. Not occasionally—every time. Travel itineraries, product reviews, café ratings, I run everything through other people's recommendations before making a decision. I have always considered this perfectly normal, even smart: follow the majority and you probably will not go wrong.
Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch's 1974 uses and gratifications study could almost be describing me. They argue that audiences are active, approaching media with clear needs they want to satisfy. My need is to reduce the risk of a bad decision, and my chosen medium is REDnote. The whole process is voluntary, purposeful, rational. Their framework makes my behavior look entirely reasonable.
But Katz's earlier work on the two-step flow raises a complication: information passes through "opinion leaders" before it reaches the broader audience. The review bloggers I rely on are exactly those opinion leaders. They have already done a round of filtering for me—what is worth visiting, what is not—and by the time the information reaches me it is a processed conclusion. I think I am "looking up information," but what I am really doing is receiving judgments that a group of strangers has already made on my behalf.
The thing is, I quite enjoy this arrangement. I have told friends that I am not someone who likes trial and error. But lately I have been wondering whether this is a trait I have always had, or whether REDnote made trial and error feel unnecessary. When you can look up the "right answer" at any moment, figuring things out on your own starts to seem pointless. If it is the latter, then the uses and gratifications claim that audiences "bring their needs to media" has a problem, because the need itself may have been shaped by the medium.
Hall argues that audiences decode messages within frameworks set by encoders. His version of that framework is fairly abstract, but the one I encounter every day is very concrete: it is not an ideology constraining me, but a recommendation system built from algorithms and bloggers that defines what counts as "good" and "worth it." Every choice I make inside this system stays within the boundaries it has drawn. And I have fully adapted to this arrangement—it feels comfortable. But knowing all of this, I will still open REDnote before going out tomorrow. Knowing you are inside a framework and stepping outside of it seem to be entirely different things. So what good does knowing do?