The Ecology of Incidental News Exposure

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 like identity relevance; motivational states like media use motives and traits like relative media preferences; environmental perception traits like the perceived effort and their state equivalents.

Environmental factors include the characteristics of users’ social networks, including state factors such as who shared a piece of news, and traits like the level of news interest in one’s social network; and the larger media environment, including state factors such as the overall news agenda or current news framing, or media environment traits such as the influence of the algorithmic shaping of information flows.

Each of these factors will effect incidental exposure patterns; users may imagine that important news will find them or that they must actively work to encounter news, for instance. Overall, it is likely that both environmental and individual factors will matter; that states and traits both need critical attention; and that there is a need for further theory-building through research.