Strategies for Dealing with Online News Overload

The third speaker in this IAMCR2019 session is Zhieh Lor, whose focus is on coping strategies for dealing with news overload in social media. Such cognitive overload is becoming a problem because of the considerable increase in news dissemination and sharing through a complex multitude of channels. How do users manage this?

The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing suggests that this volume of content encountered triggers symptoms of cognitive overload, and the hypothesis here is that the size of a user’s news repertoire will be positively associated with their level of news overload. Strategies for avoiding such overload altogether might include a disregard for specific news items or sources or a complete disconnection from news flows, while strategies for selecting news content more carefully might include a narrowing of the news flow or a ‘browse and dive’ approach that selects only a handful of headlines for in-depth engagement.

Are these strategies distinct dimensions, then, or are they used in concert with each other? This may be affected by the level of news overload perceived by the individual news user. Zhieh explored this using an online survey in Korea, which assessed news overload by asking respondents about the frequency of their use of news from diverse sources, as well as their perception of the volume of news available to them.

This found that the size of the news repertoire did affect perceptions of news overload. Coping strategies did in fact combine the four different dimensions involving avoiding and selecting dimensions. News repertoire itself might lead to disconnection, narrowing, and browse and dive approaches, while perceptions of news overload will lead to disregard and disconnection strategies.