Theoretical Approaches to News Sharing through Social Media

The next speaker in this morning session at AoIR 2015 is Jakob Linaa Jensen, whose focus is on the social sharing of news. The landscape of news is changing, of course, and the question is whether the nature of news itself is changing. To some extent, our practices remain, and only our devices have changed – but at the same time, recent changes have also afforded us greater access to the production of news, as well as to new modes and a greater diversity in consuming news.

Perhaps the most important change is to how the news is being shared, as the borderline between production and consumption. Several studies have explored the processes of sharing the news through social media, in particular; Jakob is calling Facebook a meta-medium which incorporates multiple other media within its content, for example.

How does news content move across different media and platforms, then? How can this be researched? The idea of news sharing is far from new; at first, news was shared in the form of rumours, and some of the early forms of circulating such news, going back as far as the ancient world, could be described as social media.

In theories examining the dissemination of news during the mass media age, several frameworks are of interest: at the macro level we could point to agenda-setting, news cycles, and newsworthiness theory; at the meso level, opinion leadership theories were crucial; and at the micro level consonance and dissonance theories and credibility theories were important, too.

In the social media age, at macro level there's still agenda-setting and news cycles, but at the meso level newsworthiness and spread ability become all important; at the micro level we rediscover opinion leadership in addition to consonance and dissonance, social presence, immediacy, and the sense of being with one another.

We thus need to move our theoretical focus from the macro to the micro level in order to encompass the logics of sharing and virality. Social interaction theories amongst citizens are also becoming more important than cognition logics. This is all part of the move from a search to a filter culture: gatekeeping is not dead, but more filters are needed, and such filtering is now based on interactivity and socialisation – on curation.

We are moving from information to social interaction, then, and knowledge and information is increasingly defined by networks and algorithms. The social media news environment is partly overlapping with that of conventional mainstream media, and new dynamics of newsworthiness in the former are beginning to affect the latter.

Jakob's project will therefore conduct quantitative user surveys at the macro level, hashtag analysis at the meso level, and qualitative interviews about sharing patterns and motivations at the micro level. The first of these stages shows that TV remains the most important news medium, but online and social media are becoming increasingly important, with particular news themes being especially strong. There is still much more consumption than sharing, and such sharing works face-to-face as well as through social media, but social media sharing is increasing.