The past 2 decades have witnessed important contributions to our understanding of political conversation and its effects. However, in many ways we have yet to scratch the surface of what we need to learn. We argue that the emphasis of the literature on political conversation as a weak form of deliberation or as an afterthought from the media effects perspective has led to neglect of important aspects of the interpersonal communication process that require careful consideration. Here we briefly review the political conversation literature, followed by a detailed consideration of limitations of current research that point to new directions that more appropriately take into consideration what we know about individuals and their lives as communicators.

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Social media users are able to read, share, and discuss news online with other people coming from diverse contexts in their lives, including family members, co-workers, and friends. Past research has indicated that “context collapse” occurs when people must imagine and negotiate interacting with a large and diverse online audience. Using survey data from 771 US Internet users, we find that more context collapse in people’s Facebook friends is positively related to both sharing and reading news. Furthermore, reading news on Facebook mediates the relationship between context collapse and news sharing. Finally, privacy management moderates the relationship between reading and sharing news on Facebook, where people who are more open in their privacy management practices share more news.