• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.18
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• pp.73-88
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• 2010

With the recent trend of Web 2.0, experts argue that the UCC age has blossomed where people themselves produce their own content and share it on the Internet. However, more academic studies on video UCC production are needed to understand fully the video UCC phenomenon in Korea. This study was done as an exploratory study to investigate the motivations for video UCC production and its effects. Results reveal that the important motivations for participating in video UCC creation are fun, sharing, and self-expression. For the rewards for video UCC creation participation, feedback, sharing and self-satisfaction are considered valuable psychological rewards by the video UCC creators. Furthermore, the total amount of video UCC production is positively correlated with self-evaluation of fun, importance, and practicality of the video UCC content.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.12
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• pp.222-235
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• 2008

This study looks at motivations of video UCC users as a member of creative class. A qualitative research method was used for analyzing data collected by interviews. Killing time users, active clickers and creators are distinguished as different types of UCC users and their differing motivations are explored. The findings of the study are as follows: First, information sharing, self presentation, communication needs, ease of use for self presentation, usefulness are expressed as motivating factors for both active clickers and creators, Pleasure motivates every type of users. However, content creators experience a specific type of pleasure which is the pleasure of creativity or flow, which this study highlights as a key driving factor for content creators. The study adds to the findings of UCC user research which applies the TAM and the PAD model by revealing what pleasure and flow specifically mean for different types of UCC users.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.223-237
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• 2009

We aimed at identifying the determinants of favorable UCC usage and creation by integrating emotional dimension, social influence and motivations. The finding show the significant effect of pleasure on intrinsic motivation in both Korea and U.S.A. Arousal has a positive effect on intrinsic motivation in the United States, but it has no relationship wit h intrinsic motivation in Korea. In case of social influence, subjective norm gives a significant impact on extrinsic motivation whereas proved insignificant in the United States. Image is shown to be significantly related with extrinsic motivation in both nations. Also, intrinsic motivation does not posit an effect on UCC usage and creation in Korea whereas it influences on UCC usage and is not related with UCC creation in the United States. In addition, it was observed that UCC usage has a positive and significant impact on UCC creation in both nations.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.141-170
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• 2010

User created content (UCC) is created and shared by common users on line. From the user's perspective, the increase of UCCs has led to an expansion of alternative means of communications, while from the business perspective UCCs have formed an environment in which an abundant amount of new contents can be produced. Despite outward quantitative growth, however, many aspects of UCCs do not meet the expectations of general users in terms of quality, and this can be observed through pirated contents and user-copied contents. The purpose of this research is to investigate effective methods for fostering production of creative user-generated content. This study proposes two core elements, namely, reward and motivation, which are believed to enhance content creativity as well as the mediating factor and users' committement, which will be effective for bridging the increasing motivation and content creativity. Based on this perspective, this research takes an in-depth look at issues related to constructing the dimensions of reward and motivation in UCC services for creative content product, which are identified in three phases. First, three dimensions of rewards have been proposed: task dimension, social dimension, and organizational dimention. The task dimension rewards are related to the inherent characteristics of a task such as writing blog articles and pasting photos. Four concrete ways of providing task-related rewards in UCC environments are suggested in this study, which include skill variety, task significance, task identity, and autonomy. The social dimensioni rewards are related to the connected relationships among users. The organizational dimension consists of monetary payoff and recognition from others. Second, the two types of motivations are suggested to be affected by the diverse rewards schemes: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation occurs when people create new UCC contents for its' own sake, whereas extrinsic motivation occurs when people create new contents for other purposes such as fame and money. Third, commitments are suggested to work as important mediating variables between motivation and content creativity. We believe commitments are especially important in online environments because they have been found to exert stronger impacts on the Internet users than other relevant factors do. Two types of commitments are suggested in this study: emotional commitment and continuity commitment. Finally, content creativity is proposed as the final dependent variable in this study. We provide a systematic method to measure the creativity of UCC content based on the prior studies in creativity measurement. The method includes expert evaluation of blog pages posted by the Internet users. In order to test the theoretical model of our study, 133 active blog users were recruited to participate in a group discussion as well as a survey. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire on their commitment, motivation and rewards of creating UCC contents. At the same time, their creativity was measured by independent experts using Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Finally, two independent users visited the study participants' blog pages and evaluated their content creativity using the Creative Products Semantic Scale. All the data were compiled and analyzed through structural equation modeling. We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement model of our research. It was found that measures used in our study satisfied the requirement of reliability, convergent validity as well as discriminant validity. Given the fact that our measurement model is valid and reliable, we proceeded to conduct a structural model analysis. The results indicated that all the variables in our model had higher than necessary explanatory powers in terms of R-square values. The study results identified several important reward shemes. First of all, skill variety, task importance, task identity, and automony were all found to have significant influences on the intrinsic motivation of creating UCC contents. Also, the relationship with other users was found to have strong influences upon both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Finally, the opportunity to get recognition for their UCC work was found to have a significant impact on the extrinsic motivation of UCC users. However, different from our expectation, monetary compensation was found not to have a significant impact on the extrinsic motivation. It was also found that commitment was an important mediating factor in UCC environment between motivation and content creativity. A more fully mediating model was found to have the highest explanation power compared to no-mediation or partially mediated models. This paper ends with implications of the study results. First, from the theoretical perspective this study proposes and empirically validates the commitment as an important mediating factor between motivation and content creativity. This result reflects the characteristics of online environment in which the UCC creation activities occur voluntarily. Second, from the practical perspective this study proposes several concrete reward factors that are germane to the UCC environment, and their effectiveness to the content creativity is estimated. In addition to the quantitive results of relative importance of the reward factrs, this study also proposes concrete ways to provide the rewards in the UCC environment based on the FGI data that are collected after our participants finish asnwering survey questions. Finally, from the methodological perspective, this study suggests and implements a way to measure the UCC content creativity independently from the content generators' creativity, which can be used later by future research on UCC creativity. In sum, this study proposes and validates important reward features and their relations to the motivation, commitment, and the content creativity in UCC environment, which is believed to be one of the most important factors for the success of UCC and Web 2.0. As such, this study can provide significant theoretical as well as practical bases for fostering creativity in UCC contents.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.25-53
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• 2007

The Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM) of information systems investigates the continued information systems usage behavior. This paper expands the original post-adoption beliefs and searches the applications in the emerging hedonic information systems. Previous IS researches focused on the organizational environments. However as the information technology (especially internet) evolves, information systems have not only emerged for the organizations but also for the individual users, such as internet portals, internet communities, on-line games etc. These information systems so called Hedonic Information Systems aims to provide self-fulfilling value rather than instrumental value to the users. Researches in other disciplines, including marketing and consumer behavior research, illustrate that the hedonic and utilitarian perspective of goods and services have different influence on the consumer behavior. Goods and services used to be classified into either hedonic or utilitarian aspect but now they may belong to both aspects simultaneously. Moreover consumer's goals or tasks have both hedonic utilitarian aspects. When a consumer makes a decision to purchase or repurchase goods or services, he/she compares the hedonic and utilitarian perspectives of goods to find most suitable ones to satisfy their goals/tasks. Finally, consumer's behavior is determined by the trade-off between what the goods can provide to the consumers and in what extent the goods fulfill consumer's purchase behavior. Consumer also shows that the salience of hedonic perspective is relatively greater when consumer decides which of several items to give up (forfeiture choices) than the time when they decide which item to acquire (acquisition choices). Some researches in MIS discipline have found out that the information systems also have both hedonic and utilitarian perspectives. The decision process of whether to use information systems or not is similar to that of a consumer's decision of purchasing or repurchasing goods or services. However most of researches in MIS tend to focus on the extrinsic motivation variables which only cover the utilitarian perspective of information systems. It is only recent that researches start to investigate the intrinsic motivation variable - Perceived Enjoyment - for the hedonic perspective. Considering the consumer's purchasing decision process, users of information systems evaluate the systems through balancing between intrinsic (hedonic) and extrinsic (utilitarian) variables according to their main tasks or tendencies. This paper proposes a model that is based on the ECM of IS Continuance model modified from Expectation Confirmation Model to fit into the continued usage of information system. It first started from the decision process regarding hedonic and utilitarian perspectives in the consumer behavior literatures. The model deals with continued usage of information systems beyond the mere technology adoption as in most of the previous MIS researches. This research is particularly important to the hedonic information systems, because their business model depends on the frequent usages rather simple adoption at the beginning. Because the basic model only considered the extrinsic motivations (perceived usefulness) to explain the users' behavior and as the information systems can have both hedonic and utilitarian dimensions, it should consider both perspectives. Therefore, this newly proposed model considers intrinsic variable (perceived enjoyment) as well. Since the individual user can have a preference on either aspects that is between the hedonic and utilitarian perspective depending on his/her main tasks or goals, some variables (Hedonic Orientation and Utilitarian Orientation) meaning the extents of users' pursuing from the information system were additionally studied.