The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Elizabeth Dubois, who again highlights the moral panics about the effect of ‘the Internet’ on information flows. But there are many different media and platforms, where users exercise different media use choices. There is a need to better measure media habits, therefore, including their specific diversity, timing, and tactics.
On average, users across the countries surveyed by the Quello Search Project accessed between seven and nine sources for broadly political information (this is per day, I think?). Legacy offline media are still in wide use, alongside search and online news …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Laleah Fernandez, who begins by highlighting the moral panics around echo chambers, filter bubbles, and ‘fake news’. There is limited evidence that these issues are major concerns, but to the extent that these are genuine problems, key users might be useful in addressing these problems, by nudging vulnerable users towards more sensible behaviours.
Who are the vulnerable, however? They include those who are interested in politics but not skilled in search, and this population could be identified from their responses to the Quello Search Project. (The most vulnerable group ranged from …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, whose focus is on the role of algorithms in shaping information flows, and on users’ understandings of the impact of such algorithms. Algorithmic literacy is not yet well researched; it extends beyond digital literacy and is specific to different platforms, too.
The present study examined algorithmic literacy in the U.S. and Germany, to capture user attitudes and practices across very different media and political systems. It captured a range of personal and behavioural variables, and it seems that algorithmic knowledge, amount of use, and search skills strongly affect users’ …
The second day at ICA 2018 starts for me with a panel on the personalisation of search, and the first presenter is Grant Blank. He begins by noting the importance of free-flowing information for society, but of course the media through which such information flows have changed over time, and this has affected media biases. Contemporary media now form a diverse media ecology.
Do online media in their diversity empower citizens to make better-informed decisions, then, or does the personalisation of online media distort the information that citizens encounter? Much of the present discussion is severely undertheorised. There is a …
The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Brian Weeks, who explores the ecology of incidental news exposure. The various elements of that ecology determine who is exposed to news content, and to what extent, and what impacts such exposure may generate.
In the ecological model of incidental exposure, a number of individual and environmental factors combine. Such factors may be related, respectively, to contextual states or more fundamental traits of the individual or their environment. They include individual traits like cognitive ability or socioeconomic status, but also traits like cognitive load; self-concept traits like partisan identity or states …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Kjerstin Thorson, who begins by noting that incidental exposure is not simply random, but unevenly distributed across the online userbase. The idea of attraction may be useful here: what is it that attracts specific news content into a social media stream; who attracts incidental exposure? What practices produce attraction, or repel news content?
Who has these happy accidents of incidental exposure, then? In the weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, better levels of education mean that users are more likely to be incidentally exposed. The factors that seem to matter …
The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Richard Fletcher, who highlights the shift in news users’ main source of news – away from conventional sources and towards online, digital, app-based, and social media channels. This has been linked by some with a rise in echo chambers and filter bubbles, but the incidental news exposure that such platforms also engender means that it has been very difficult to find any real evidence for filter bubbles beyond isolated extreme cases.
One important aspect in all of this is automated incidental news exposure: do incidentally exposed news users actively curate their …
The next ICA 2018 session is on incidental news exposure, and starts with a paper presented by Pablo Boczkowski. ‘Incidental’ here means that people encounter the news without actively seeking to do so. Such work on this has been predominantly quantitative, but there is some more qualitative work on this topic emerging as well. Most of this work has been focussing on single countries in the developed world, too.
Incidental consumption of news is far from new, but is becoming more important in digital and social media contexts, and with the rise in news consumption via mobile devices. Some groups …
The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Nicholas Robinson, who starts by challenging the idea that the relationships between news media and politics operate on a linear basis. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse, and the ‘war on the news media’ now being waged by Donald Trump and other populists, this perception may need to be challenged.
Trump and others are openly hostile towards the media, and this may undermine the political apparatus. One possible reading is that as people perceive greater threats to political performance, their political interest declines; but at a closer look it …
The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.
The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …
