Internet Satisfaction Around the World

That internet has clearly been established as an everyday tool for a very large portion of our population. Especially with young people now, you most likely will not have very many days where you do not do at least something on the internet. I know I use it everyday for many different things. The Gratifications Approach tells us that whatever we are doing on the internet, we will always be  searching or using it to satisfy or obtain a specific goal. A good example is socializing with others. Its interesting to check out these gratification from country to country instead of just person to person as this approach mainly looks the differences from different people. Being the tech savvy society that we are, most people would think that we get more satisfaction from satisfying these goals compared to poorer, still developing societies. However this does not appear to be true according to venturebeat.com.  

According to a study done by Juniper Networks, developing countries actually seem to get more satisfaction from doing things on the internet. They used the example of socializing and looked at a few countries including South Africa and India to compare to the larger more developed countries like us. This study found that these less developed country's people find a greater satisfaction through online socializing compared with the people of the U.S. and other developed countries like Japan. The study also found that more surveyed people in these less developed countries stated that they could not go through their day without the internet than people of the U.S. did. The numbers were 2 in 5 and 1 in 6 respectively. The best part of the study in my opinion was what countries were found to get the most and least satisfaction. The top of the list was help by South Africa, being most satisfied with what they get out of the internet socially. The bottom was held by Japan. This was a surprise to me since Japan is seen as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. They obtain their gratification of socializing more through face to face communication since they respect this medium very highly. 

These findings really seemed odd to me. I figured that a rich country that relies so heavily on the internet for function would be more satisfied with getting their needs done through the internet. Instead though many people here feel as if it is not even needed in their lives. Another surprising finding of this study was that more people in the developing countries were satisfied with their connection compared with their counterparts in wealthier countries, even though these developing countries have much worse service and connectivity. The people of the U.S. have a much easier time getting on the internet and obtaining their desired gratification yet they are less happy. These findings really show how media use differs from society to society. 

It is interesting how different people obtain gratifications through media and how different people are satisfied in different ways from obtaining these certain gratifications. It is even more interesting when looking at this from country to country especially ones with different levels of development. The findings really do produce some unexpected surprises.