A Network Analysis of Online Audience Behaviour: Towards a Better Comprehension of the Agenda Setting Process

Abstract

By constructing the network of media audience, this study sheds light on the predominant modes of exposure to online political information in Spain. Novelty data from a panel of thirty thousand individuals is used for the research. The preliminary results bring evidences for reviewing the line of reasoning that advocates for the prevailing fragmentation of the public sphere. More notably, the results contribute to proving that a substantial level of audience concentration still remains in the web. The highest levels of audience overlapping are found in those media outlets that are driving the media agenda in the offline sphere. Therefore the study proffers evidence that the structure of the online public sphere might guarantee the necessary shared informational experiences for a deliberative democracy.The implications of the current networked audience behaviour for the study of the agenda setting process are discussed along with the chances for a shared public agenda in Spanish society. Observational methods and content analysis have been used in the study of the agenda setting process so far. However, the current communication environment characterized by unlimited, decentralized and abundant sources of political information prompts the application of new analytical approaches. Networks are at the heart of online communication and network science allows for analyzing its structure. It provides the ARTICLE

Network Model for Online News Media Landscape in Twitter

“…More specifically, this study proposes a methodology to build and analyze the network of online news media in Twitter based on follower overlap data. As shown in previous studies of audience networks [9,10,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], audience overlap among news sources offer important insights on how the audiences navigate through many news sources that are available online. In the context of the Twitter environment, follower overlap between news media accounts can be interpreted as follows.…”

“…The concept of audience overlap has a relatively long history in media studies [11], but the potential of overlap data to build a network of media was only lately uncovered [9,10,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Network is a natural representation of the news media landscape.…”

“…However, these studies disregard a number of important things, such as edge weight that represents the strength of the overlap, and there was no assessment of the statistical significance of the observed overlap. More recent research has proposed some methodological improvements to the original approach [9,10,[19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

News consumption patterns on Twitter: fragmentation study on the online news media network

“…The concept of audience overlap has a relatively long history in media studies, but the potential of overlap data to build network of media was only lately uncovered [ 5 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. Audience overlap can be interpreted as a measure of similarity: the more audience any two news outlets share, the closer those outlets are in terms of their audience base.…”

“…There are many studies that examine the phenomenon of fragmentation in the news media landscape [5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. However, it remains an empirical question to determine whether this is really a characteristic of current news consumption patterns, or whether the extent of fragmentation differs across countries and media platforms.…”