The Effects of Reading Political Blogs

Singapore.
The next paper in this ICA 2010 session is by Aaron Veenstra, whose interest is in the cognitive processing of blog-based information. He begins by raising the problem with the term 'new media' - an idea which remains in flux, to which new communication tools are constantly added. There remain significant gaps in the blog literature, too - we still have only a general definition of what blogs are, indeed.

The readers of blogs, Aaron suggests from previous work, are more susceptible to framing effects than other media users; there is a constraint of attitudes and a set of responses to media content which is not found in users of other media. The focus here is on political blogs, whose technical definitions are workable but remain dynamic, and which are difficult to define from an informational perspective. Especially at the popular end, there are significant inconsistencies between blog formats and styles; at the bottom end, there is a similar fuzziness.

Another approach is to better understand the readers of such sites. We already know about the stratification of the political blogosphere, the clustering around different political views, and the differences between community and individual functions, and we can build on this, but there is little in-depth research on the attitudes, behaviours, and demographics of political blog readers.

One key dimension here is also the political sophistication of blog readers - defined variously as interest, attention, knowledge, attitude constraint, active information processing; political blog readers should appear to rank higher on a number of these characteristics. Such sophistication should also lead to differences in cognition - sophisticated users should respond differently to framing, may resist persuasion and respond more openly to rational argument. Where they are part of an online community, that membership and subscription to the community's values may also affect their processing of information.

Aaron's experiment worked with a video news story about stem cell research which was presented to respondents in a variety of ways (different lead-ins, stand-alone vs. embedded in a blog). Respondents included students, members of the general public, and blog readers.

Overall, the study produced mixed results - one question that emerges is whether blog readers see political strategy as political value; elements of political sophistication and of community membership also appear to be of importance. Blog readers also do seem to have a particular understanding of how the media work (this is somewhat different from political sophistication - more a kind of media sophistication); what also needs to be examined are the effects of starting to read blogs as compared to increasing use.

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