The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sujin Choi, presenting a stochastic actor-oriented modelling of shared-issue networks and personal news curation behaviours. The focus here is especially on issue publics, which pay particular attention to specific issues; this reflects the attention economy. But how do such issue publics come to be?
Issue publics might come to be because individuals have similar underlying interests; because they are unaware of other issues; or because of a manual filtering process. Such processes will be affected by their attention to issues (the monadic level); their awareness of other issues (the dyadic level); and the interaction of those two levels.
Drawing on some 143 individuals with high issue involvement from a two-wave survey around the Korean presidential election, this project found that there was no tendency to align with politically like-minded individuals; consumption of the same genre led to the formation of shared issue relationships, and not the other way around. Those who filtered content manually more often were exposed to more diverse genres. This disproves conceptions of political homophily, single-minded issue attachment, and self-reinforcing manual filtering practices.
