Uses and gratifications (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1973)

Flips the field's question from "what does media do to people" to "what do people do with media." The audience is active: it selects and uses content to satisfy pre-existing needs — information/surveillance, personal identity, social integration (relationships), and entertainment/diversion. Effects are gated by the gratification sought.

Transfer. The audience is not a target to be hit but a chooser deciding whether you satisfy a need it already brought. Content survives the selection only when the gratification it delivers is real and legible up front — the direct match to the awareness column's core: be the genuine best answer to a question already being asked. This reframes "reach" as fit: identify which of the four needs your artifact serves and make that gratification unmistakable in the first seconds, or the active audience selects past you. Slop fails here not for lack of polish but for serving no need the reader actually has.

Kin: two-step-flow · encoding-decoding · being-seen-reliably · slop-is-a-context-deficit · models