Jakob OhmeWeizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society
Jakob Ohme
PhD
About
62
Publications
36,822
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,292
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
November 2018 - present
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- PostDoc in the Digital Communication Methods Lab Focusing on mobile media research and methods
August 2017 - October 2018
April 2014 - July 2017
Education
October 2010 - March 2011
Field of study
- Marketing Communications, News Effects, Psychology of Media Use
September 2009 - March 2012
September 2006 - September 2009
Publications
Publications (62)
Research into digital platforms has become increasingly difficult. One way to overcome these difficulties is to build on data access rights in EU data protection law, which requires platforms to offer users a copy of their data. In data donation studies, researchers ask study participants to exercise this right and donate their data to science. How...
This article explores the interactions between journalistic actors and emerging open-source intelligence and investigation (OSINT) communities. It employs qualitative content analysis of discourse from two OSINT communities surrounding three events following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which received substantial coverage in news media....
Scrolling through a social media newsfeed has become almost ubiquitous. Yet, it remains unknown what specific post elements people pay attention to and whether this varies depending on how they access social media newsfeeds. In an eye-tracking experiment among university students (N = 201), we compare user attention to specific post elements like s...
Digitally networked and new, unconventional activities allow citizens to participate politically in activities that are low in the effort and risks they bear. At the same time, low-effort types of participation are more loosely connected to democratic political systems, thereby challenging established modes of political decision-making. This can se...
Social media platforms are crucial sources of political information during election campaigns, with datafication processes underlying the algorithmic curation of newsfeeds. Recognizing the role of individuals in shaping datafication processes and leveraging the metaphor of news attraction, we study the impact of user curation and networks on mobili...
The increasing prevalence of news snacking – that is, the brief, intermittent attendance to news in mainly digital and mobile media contexts – has been discussed as a problematic behavior potentially leading to a less informed public. Empirical research, however, that investigates the relationship between news snacking and political knowledge is sp...
In the battle against misinformation, do negative spillover effects of communicative efforts intended to protect audiences from inaccurate information exist? Given the relatively limited prevalence of misinformation in people’s news diets, this study explores if the heightened salience of misinformation as a persistent societal threat can have an u...
In social media effects research, the role of specific social media content is understudied, in part attributable to the fact that communication science previously lacked methods to access social media content directly. Digital trace data (DTD) can shed light on textual and audio-visual content of social media use and enable the analysis of content...
As chatbots are gaining more popularity than ever, they have recently been considered as interesting tools for survey administration in social science research. To explore this idea, we investigated the extent to which there are differences in response characteristics and data quality between a traditional, web-based survey and a conversational, ch...
People increasingly turn to news on mobile devices, often while out and about, attending to daily tasks. Yet, we know little about whether attention to and learning from information on a mobile differs by the setting of use. This study builds on Multiple Resource Theory (Wickens, 1984) and the Resource Competition Framework (Oulasvirta et al., 2005...
This thematic issue includes ten articles that address previous contradictions in research on two main trends in digital democracies: news avoidance and political polarization. Looking at these contradictions from different angles, all contributions suggest one aspect in particular that could be important for future research to investigate more spe...
Low levels of news seeking can be problematic for an informed citizenry. Previous research has discussed different types of news non-attendance but conceptual ambiguities between low news usage, general news avoidance, and news topic avoidance still exist. By using a longitudinal design conducted with a chatbot survey among Dutch users (n = 189), t...
Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens. But while some people simply have a low preference for news, others avoid the news intentionally. So far little is known about the relationship between active news avoidance and civic engagement in society, a void this study has set out...
This preview article discusses PORT—a data donation software newly developed by Boeschoten et al.—toward the background of three core data donation principles: privacy protection, meaningful data extraction, and securing user agency.
Despite the increasing presence of advertising on social media, research looking into the relative effects of social media ads is limited and highly dependent on either self-report or basic engagement metrics (e.g., likes). Our understanding of social media advertising is further complicated by (1) constantly changing advertising strategies, such a...
In 2018-9, millions of youth participated in climate-related marches across the globe. This activism reflects youth’s distinctive form of political participation: cause-oriented, expressive, and networked. However, the pathway between environmental concern and environmental activism is complicated in some contexts and for some citizens. This articl...
This study investigates whether knowledge gains from news post exposure are different when scrolling through a social media newsfeed on a smartphone compared to a desktop PC. While prior research has mostly focused on new platforms people receive news on (e.g., social media) for political learning, first indications exist that device modality (i.e....
The digital traces that people leave through their use of various online platforms provide tremendous opportunities for studying human behavior. However, the collection of these data is hampered by legal, ethical and technical challenges. We present a framework and tool for collecting these data through a data donation platform where consenting par...
We test generational differences in media trust and its antecedents, including political trust, interest, and orientation, as well as perceptions of media inaccuracy and media bias. We rely on original survey data from ten European countries, collected in 2019. We find no differences in the levels of media trust between generations, but we find tha...
In a global crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world are dependent on voluntary support of their citizens. Based on a four-wave panel survey conducted in the Netherlands between April and July 2020 (n = 1742), this study investigates the development of citizens’ engagement in prosocial political activities and what motivates...
This book investigates news use patterns among fve diferent generations in a time where digital media create a multi-choice media environment.
The book introduces the EPIG model (Engagement-ParticipationInformation-Generation) to study how diferent generational cohorts’ exposure to political information is related to their political engagement and...
With digital communication increasingly shifting to mobile devices, communication research needs to explore ways to retrieve, process, and analyze digital trace data on people’s most personal devices. This study presents a new methodological approach, mobile data donations, in which smartphone usage data is collected unobtrusively with the help of...
Media are an important pillar of political socialization, that is, the way a person learns about the function of democratic principles and institutions in their formative years and beyond. Changes in the social and media environment affect the way new citizens become politically socialized. With the emergence of social media, communication changed...
jats:p> The authors explore patterns of smartphone use during the first weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Belgium, focusing on citizens’ use of smartphones to consume news and to communicate and interact with others. Unique smartphone tracking data from 2,778 Flemish adults reveal that at the height of the out...
Selective exposure to likeminded political viewpoints on algorithmic social media platforms is considered a potential source of polarization of public opinion. We still know little about the proposed mechanism or how potential reinforcement of specific attitudes affects citizens’ political behavior, especially in a nonelectoral context. Focusing on...
Young citizens increasingly turn to social media platforms for political information. These platforms enable direct communication between politicians and citizens, circumventing the influence of traditional news outlets. We still know little about the consequences of direct contact with politicians on such platforms for citizens’ political particip...
On social media, journalistic news products compete with entertainment-oriented and user-generated contents on two different stages of news use: First, users navigate their attention through a continuous stream of information in their newsfeed and, second, they potentially click on some of these posts to spend time with the actual full-contents. Th...
Especially during election times, news is an indispensable means for citizens to make informed political decisions. The ubiquitous information access of mobile devices creates the potential for increasing news use among citizens in general and specifically during campaign time. However, little is known about the outcomes of this new way of accessin...
Contemporary democracies are increasingly shaped by a surge of populism, posing serious threats to the idea of liberal democracy. Particularly in the run-up to elections, knowledge of such threats is essential for citizens to cast an informed vote. Against this background, the present study examined the likelihood of media users to engage with poli...
During election times, societal actors frequently employ specific get-out-the-vote campaigns to mobilize young voters’ turnout and engagement with the election. Although such campaigns receive praise in society, little is known about how effective they are and if they shape longer lasting types of political engagement. This study presents novel evi...
In this study, we explore the media exposure of digital native first-time voters and test for its mobilizing potential for their campaign participation. We compare first-time voters’ and experienced voters’ exposure to political information on social network sites, non-social online media and offline media. Using a unique research design that invol...
Is there a connection between increased use of digital media and changing patterns of political participation? This study tests how the use of online media for different purposes (social interaction, creative expression, online news use, social media news use) is related to three types of political participation. It examines whether mobilizing effe...
The digital media environment changes the way citizens receive political information, also during an election campaign. Particularly first-time voters increasingly use social media platforms as news sources. Yet, it is less clear how accessing political information in such a unique social setting affects these cohorts’ decision-making processes dur...
In a time when digitally networked and unconventional activities challenge our understanding of political participation, van Deth (Acta Polit 49(3):349–367, 2014) has developed a map to consolidate previous attempts at conceptualizing political participation. He suggests a framework operating with four distinct types of political participation that...
The increasing relevance of mobile surveys makes it important to gather empirical evidence on designs of such surveys. This research note presents the results of a test study conducted to identify the best set-up for a smartphone-based survey. We base our analysis on a random sample of Danish citizens (n=196) who participated in mobile surveys duri...
In today’s convergent media environment, media exposure becomes
increasingly channel-independent and social media-bound, and media content
is more frequently accessed on mobile devices. This calls for new
approaches to measuring media exposure. This study applies an innovative
approach to survey (n = 2378) exposure to political information in the f...
With the digitalization of information, subsequently leading to a fragmentation of audiences (Benett & Iyengar, 2008) and a change in the prevailing media logic (Schulz, 2014), a convergent media environment has developed. Nowadays, social media offer a platform for converging streams of information, altering the media diet for a growing share of t...
Update May 2019
***The paper was just published open access - full text added ***
The relationship between the citizens, the media, and political actors in democracies has changed over the last decade, particularly in response to changes in the media environment, which are amplified by digital communication. Nowadays it’s nothing new that online m...
The distribution of smartphones in western societies nowadays reached a critical mass with two-thirds of the populations of countries like Denmark, Sweden, the UK or Australia owning a smartphone (Our Mobile Planet, 2013). The current study will gain new insights in how valid and manifold smartphones can be used in public opinion research by conduc...
Mobile government (in short: m-government) is just at the beginning of its rise as a future trend of e-government. Considering technical advancements such as mobile Internet, smartphones, and tablet-PCs, m-government represents a tremendous new potential for the communication between governments and citizens. There are many examples of failures of...
This study investigates the influence of so called slacktivism on life satisfaction among users of the Social Network Site Facebook. Our work focuses on the moderating role that user motivation plays in utilizing this new and easy way of civic engagement online, especially on showing support for environmental, nature and animal protection, e.g. by...
Mobile Government as a subset of E-Government is part of the Open Government approach of leading countries, like Germany. Since adoption rates among the citizens are still low this study tries to answer the question, what factors concerning the relationship of the government and its citizens might prevent a successful implementation. It is argued t...
Mobile Government steht noch ganz am Anfang seiner Entwicklung und birgt doch große Potentiale, die vor allem von aktuellen technischen Entwicklungen wie Mobile Internet und Smartphones getragen und beflügelt werden. An diesem Punkt setzt die vorliegende Arbeit an, die Akzeptanz von Mobile Government unter den Bürgern zu untersuchen, um vor einer w...
Mobile Government (in short: M-Government) is just at the beginning of its rise as a future trend of E-Government. Considering the technical advancements such as mobile Internet, smart phones and tablet-PCs, M-Government tremendously develops a new potential for organizational communication processes. There are many examples of failures of early E-...
Past research has discussed the change to a new digital media environment for almost a decade. But still, research on television usage and television’s effects does not seem to be up to date: the measurement of watching television in recent studies still focuses traditional television usage, connected to the classical TV set. The term ‘television’...
Questions
Questions (3)
We are doing an automated content analysis of newspaper articles and so far found a way to assess all of the categories we need with automated coding. The only category left is 'personalisation', so is the articles using exemplars in this news story, real people, normal citizens, etc. If anyone has an idea how to assess this automated using keywords or maybe has ever done it, I would be very happy to hear about it.
Thanks a lot!
Hey,
I'm working in a bigger survey project where we would like to ask respondents at the end of the survey for access to their Facebook-profile to get more details about their network, content and routines of usage? The question I have now is, if it is better to use one of our private profiles (or make a new one) for this and be 'friends' with the respondents or set up a Facebook page and ask respondents to follow us.
Has anyone done that or can share experiences with the legal issues respectively the accessibility of user data (for sure not without permission of the respondents). But still: what is the better, easier and more fruitful way in terms of output?Where can I access more data of my respondents, for example via netvizz?
Any comments are highly appreciated! Thanks a lot!
I will measure 'political interest' in a big survey about communication and public engagement. However, the most measurements that are around for me seem to very simplistic, using one single question or following the big election studies, two or or three item question. Has anyone found or used a more sophisticated or other simply different way of measuring political interest? Thanks a lot.
