The Effects of Digital Media Images on Political Participation Online: Results of an Eye‐Tracking Experiment Integrating Individual Perceptions of “Photo News Factors”

Abstract

Research in communication and political science has underlined the relevance of participation offline and online for the performance and stability of democratic societies, and shown that media has a substantial impact on people's willingness to participate in political discourses. However, the impact of visual message features, prevalent in contemporary online environments, on political participation online remains unclear and needs further research. This article examines two research questions: How and under what conditions do digital news media images trigger political online participation? Which roles do specific image features ("photo news factors" such as negativity, emotionality, visual attraction, or saliency) play in this respect? Based on an experimental study integrating eyetracking measurement, our empirical analysis reveals that individuals are more willing to politically participate online, if they perceive news media images with specific "photo news factors": press photography individuals acknowledge as surprising, emotional, attractive, newsworthy, that is geographically proximal, controversial, relevant, or salient. We also find that the sensory perception of news media images can cause a positive and significant impact. If the media image is regarded as being newsworthy or as negative by individual recipients, they are more likely to then engage in online participation.

Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1

“…Social biases arise particularly for all research relying on social media data, as these platforms are known to under-represent certain demographic groups (e.g., gender and educational biases on Twitter and Facebook; Barberá & Rivero, 2015;Mellon & Prosser, 2017). Another challenge to representativeness occurs with very demanding forms of data collection such as web tracking or eye tracking which for different reasons often result in very small samples, but with large amounts of fine-grained individuallevel data (Möller, Van de Velde, Merten & Puschmann, 2020;Geise, Heck & Panke, 2020).…”

“…While such a fixation filter is a common and necessary technological requisite, the fixationclassification algorithms used can affect data precision (Hessels, Kemner, van den Boomen & Hooge, 2016). It is also common practice here to subsequently define so-called "areas of interest"-specific areas of the received stimuli, over which the eye tracking data are then compared (Geise, Heck & Panke, 2020;Hessels et al, 2016). Such methodological decisions should critically reflect the fact that standards for setting this technological pre-structuring are only slowly established-but the resulting data and findings are rarely questioned later (Geise, 2014).…”

Still Images—Moving People? How Media Images of Protest Issues and Movements Influence Participatory Intentions

“…The allocation of visual attention, which is a precondition of any subsequent effect that a media image can induce, is not directly open to observation, however. Nevertheless, by indicating the underlying attentional processes through objective, nonreactive, and quantitative observational measures (Bucher and Schumacher 2006), eye tracking enables researchers to draw inferences about visual attention, signifying where, at what frequency, in what sequence, and for how long recipients look at certain visual and textual information (Bol et al 2016; Geise et al 2020).…”

Building Social Capital Online During the COVID-19 Transition in Indonesia

“…Participation has various meanings and has been researched to see how such participation can transform and enter the digital or online pattern. Involvement in digital or online concepts is considered to reach less active social groups and affect their level (Geise, Heck, & Panke, 2020). In addition, the second purpose of this study also seeks to explore the possibility of bridging social capital in online social networks.…”