Motives For and Against Participating: a Hermeneutical Study of Media Participation in Norway and Ireland, 2005-2006

There is a tension between consumer and citizen motives for participating in media and the internet. The first is oriented to personal gain and self-fulfillment, while the second is oriented to long-term collective goals of a political nature. People are in the process of adopting these motives to the social media and their participatory requirements, and tensions run high. This chapter discusses two forms of motivation; enjoyment and engagement, and we define them normatively to inform our empirical analysis of reasoning by consenting adults in Dublin, Ireland (2006) and Bergen, Norway (2005). We asked 64 people about their participation in the various media at their disposal, and in analysing the transcriptions we categorized their statements into a continuum of motives from positive to negative. We believe that this continuum can be used as an analytical tool for developments in social media like Twitter and Facebook.