New media have made available a wide range of platforms and content choices. However, audiences cope with abundant choices by using more narrowly defined repertoires. Unfortunately, we know little of how users create repertoires across media platforms. This study uses factor analysis to identify user-defined repertoires from data obtained by following 495 users throughout an entire day. Results indicate the presence of four repertoires that are powerfully tied to the rhythms of people's daily lives. These were in turn explained by a combination of factors such as audience availability and individual demographics.
In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election, we indeed find the fake news audience comprises a small, disloyal group of heavy Internet users. We also find that social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news. With this revised understanding, we revisit the democratic implications of the fake news crisis.
Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups-millennials and boomers-that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts.In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of shared usage obtained from passively metered usage data across a vast range of online news outlets for millennials and boomers. We compare each cohort's usage networks comprising various types of news websites. Our analyses reveal a smaller-than-commonlyassumed generational gap in online news usage, with characteristics that manifest the multifarious E Equal contributors (names in alphabetical order).An Infrastructural Perspective on Online News Use 2 effects of the infrastructural aspect of the media environment, alongside those of preferences.
This study investigates the role of both cultural and technological factors in determining audience formation on a global scale. It integrates theories of media choice with theories of global cultural consumption and tests them by analyzing shared audience traffic between the world's 1,000 most popular websites. We find that language and geographic similarities are more powerful predictors of audience overlap than hyperlinks and genre similarity, highlighting the role of cultural structures in shaping global media use.
1 We thank James Ettema for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The current version has also benefited greatly from extended discussion with James Webster, Stephanie Edgerly and Edward Malthouse. We are very grateful for the detailed and constructive feedback from the anonymous reviewers. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the terrific editorial support and direction from the editor of The Information Society.
AbstractThe dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain web users' choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and access blockage matters only when such sites are blocked. We examine the case of China, where online blockage is notoriously comprehensive, and compare Chinese web usage patterns with those elsewhere. Analyzing audience traffic among the 1000 most visited websites, we find that websites cluster according to language and geography.Chinese websites constitute one cluster, which resembles other such geo-linguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and degree of isolation. Our sociological investigation reveals a greater role of cultural proximity than access blockage in explaining online behaviors.
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