“Be Less of a Slave to the News”: A Texto-Material Perspective on News Avoidance among Young Adults

Abstract

The distinct media repertoire of young adults in the digital age, especially their increasing ability to bypass the news media, inspires a wealth of research. While previous studies have focused on social-and content-related motivations to avoid the news, we have yet to fully understand the interplay of such motivations with material, technology-related considerations. Drawing on 36 in-depth interviews with Israeli young adults, this paper explores the varied motivations of young audiences to avoid the news through a texto-material conceptualization of news avoidance as directed at both contents and objects. An inductive-qualitative analysis of young adults' media consumption narratives identified three main dimensions: content, medium, and user-oriented news avoidance. The study demonstrates the material aspects of both deliberate and unintentional news avoidance, and how they relate to content-oriented considerations. Furthermore, the Israeli socio-political context reveals that in times of crisis, these motivations are shared by both heavy and light news consumers. Taken together, the different avoidance motivations and practices identified in this study provide an analytical framework to further understand news avoidance and design differentiated strategies to address young adults' disengagement from news.

Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown

“…Avoiding hopelessness (Woodstock 2014) or "overwhelming feelings of compassion towards news of human suffering" (Helgerud 2017, 1) are found to be important motivations for news avoidance also in some of the already mentioned studies, which further outline user strategies for prioritizing time and attention for important caretaking responsibilities (e.g., Toff and Palmer 2019). A recent study (Aharoni, Kligler-vilenchik, and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2020) productively differentiates between content-related, medium-specific or user-oriented motivations for news avoidance. This study, as well as a few other contributions (e.g., Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2021) frame avoidance as part of broader practices of navigating news.…”

“…Adapted from the typology developed by Aharoni, Kligler-vilenchik, and Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2020) of content-based, medium-based or user-oriented avoidance, we find it fruitful to characterize avoidance strategies found in our material as either time/ activity-based or medium/content-based.…”

Taking a Break from News: A Five-nation Study of News Avoidance in the Digital Era

“…The country-specific supply of news can contribute particularly to cognitive news avoidance. For example, in Israela news-saturated culturethe burden generated by the intense coverage of an ongoing, polarizing political crisis alongside the sense of obligation to stay informed have mutually shaped people's news avoidance practices and motivations (Aharoni et al, 2021). In the case of the US, a salient trend in news supply affecting news avoidance might be what Benkler, Faris and Roberts (2018) examine in terms of asymmetric polarization.…”

“…These include both the information environments and the collective values, perceptions, and norms shared around them (Toff and Kalogeropoulos 2020). For instance, in a study conducted in Israel, times of crisis were found to motivate both heavy and light consumers to temporarily circumvent the news (Aharoni, Kligler-Vilenchik, and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2021). In a turbulent context of an ongoing violent conflict, some news avoidance motivations seem to go beyond individuals' content preferences and demonstrate a cultural prism for news avoidance.…”

“…The Israeli media system is characterized by similar features of concentration and polarization, and can be viewed as a hybrid of the liberal, polarized-pluralist and democratic-corporatist models, due to its commercial nature combined with political parallelism and high levels of news consumption (Thorson, Vraga, and Kligler-Vilenchik 2014). News consumption culture in Israel is marked by a sense of civic obligation to stay informed (Aharoni, Kligler-Vilenchik, and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2021). The contemporary media system in the United States exhibits high levels of technological innovation and of polarizationboth in patterns of supply and of demand.…”