Voyeurism and Exhibitionism as gratifications from Prosuming Social Networking sites

In social networking sites (SNSs), the user has a dual role as one produces content for both oneself and for the other users, and consumes the content produced by other users. Thus, we argue the SNS users can be characterized as prosumers. Drawing on the Uses & Gratifications approach, we further argue that voyeurism and exhibitionism are important gratifications from prosuming SNSs. We thus examine voyeurism as an outcome of content consumption and exhibitionism as an outcome of content production in SNS setting. To this end, we use Partial Least Squares (PLS) to analyse a sample of 289 Facebook users. The results show that content consumption significantly predicts voyeurism and content production exhibitionism. The study contributes to the literature on SNS use by disaggregating SNS use into content consumption and content production, and placing voyeurism and exhibitionism as the outcomes of the two. As its second main contribution, the study applies and further develops the concept of prosumption towards SNS use.