Media motives and self-disclosure in blogs: a comparison of Chinese and American culture

Title from first page of PDF file (viewed November 19, 2010)Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-64)Based on previous research on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), this study applied the research paradigm of uses and gratifications to study media motives and self-disclosure behaviors to a very new computer application: weblog. Self-administered surveys were conducted in both United States and China to compare cultural variations on blogging motives and different aspects of self-disclosure: the amount of, depth, honest, positive-negative dimension, and intention. Sample of 283 American college students and 141 Chinese college students were included in the survey. Data from this study indicated that blogs were used in both countries as functional alternatives to face-to-face communication in gratifying information and entertaining motives, however, Chinese students had more "professional" usages of blogs than American students. Meanwhile, blogs appeared to have its own unique function the other communications cannot provide or are not good at providing, as to gratify the self-expression motive for people from both countries. When it comes to self-disclosure, results from this study revealed that Chinese students engaged in more amount of, more honest and deeper self-disclosure than their American counterparts, a tendency different from what has been found in interpersonal communication