Incidental News: How Young People Consume News on Social Media

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Incidental News: How Young People Consume News on Social Media
Abstract
This paper examines the dynamics of news
consumption on social media through sixteen open-
ended interviews with young users from Argentina. It
adopts a texto-material perspective to explore the role
of technology and users’ motivations, actions and
interpretations. The interviews reveal that the ideal-
typical mode in which young users consume news on
social media can be characterized with the notion of
“incidental news”: most young users get the news on
their mobile devices as part of their constant
connection to media platforms; they encounter the
news all the time, rather than looking for it; but click
on them only sporadically and spend little time
engaging with the content. Thus, the news becomes un-
differentiated from the rest of the social and
entertainment information. This mode of news access
marks a significant discontinuity with the consumption
of news on other media. It also raises major editorial
and political implications.
1.!Introduction
The consumption of news is essential to
participation in social, cultural and political life [18],
[19], [31], [37], [50]. During the second half of the
twentieth century there was a fairly stable regime of
news consumption practices across the dominant media
of the time—print, radio and television. The advent of
the all-news, 24-hour cable television in the 1980s
began to destabilize this regime, and the
commercialization of the web in the mid-1990s altered
it dramatically. This triggered a flurry of research
about the dynamics of online news consumption—for a
review of this scholarship, see [36]. In the past few
years the emergence and rapid popularization of social
media has further upended the status quo of news
consumption. According to a recent Pew report, 62%
of the adult population in the United States gets news
on social media [24]. Despite the popularity of news
consumption in social media, little is known about its
dynamics, the role of technology, and the similarities
and differences with respect to print, broadcast, and
web options.
This paper contributes to fill this void through an
exploratory study of how young users consume news
on social media. It is based on sixteen open-ended
interviews with people ages 18 to 29. The interviews
were undertaken in Argentina, between March and
June, 2016. Open-ended interviews are well suited for
exploratory research because they enable the analyst to
let interviewees describe the practices and meanings
associated with new technical capabilities—in this
case, the use of social media for news consumption—
in whichever way they deem suitable and without
parameters of inquiry imposed beforehand, as in the
case of surveys or experiments. The focus on young
users is because when it comes to social media they
have often functioned as “lead sources of innovation”
[52] by developing modes of interaction that they get
later adopted by other age groups. Moreover, news
consumption lifetime habits are often set by the time
individuals turn 30 years of age [16], [2]. The choice to
locate the research in Argentina is to offer an
alternative to the U.S.-centered geographic focus of the
vast majority of studies of technological and cultural
practices in social media.
Because the consumption of news on social
media—or any other device—is both a technological
and a content practice, we adopt a “texto-material
perspective” [44] to analyze our data. This perspective
stems from the notion that media technologies are
unique types of artifact in that they are “at once
cultural material and material culture” [6, p. 955].
Thus, to make sense of this duality a texto-material
perspective looks at issues of technological
infrastructures and actions; content configurations; and
the agency of users in weaving technology and content
in their everyday practices.
We find that the ideal-typical mode in which young
users consume news on social media can be
characterized with the notion of “incidental news”.
Most young users get the news on their mobile devices
as part on being on platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
They encounter the news, rather than looking for it.
They do this as part of living in the media, rather using
media. The affordances of mobile devices enable
constant connectivity, and the algorithmic logic of
Facebook and the chronological logic of Twitter un-
differentiates news content from other forms of content
that they encounter on their social media feeds. Young
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Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2017
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41371
ISBN: 978-0-9981331-0-2
CC-BY-NC-ND

users encounter news on social media all the time, but
click on them only sporadically--and once they do they
spend little time reading or viewing the content. News
consumption is integrated into broader patterns of
social media sociability, but at the expense of
understanding the news report as a unique entity that
deserves special attention and has an integrity of its
own—the notion that a newspaper or a television show
is an authoritative rendition of the day’s main events
loses significance in the social media maelstrom. Thus,
the emergence of incidental news marks a significant
discontinuity with the consumption of news in print
and broadcast media, and, albeit to a lesser extent, with
the consumption of news on the web using computers.
There was incidental learning of news in print and
broadcast media, as has been argued by a number of
scholars, and it increased with the advent of the
internet [18], [30], [49]. But it was secondary to the
more purposeful consumption of news. By contrast,
what we describe in this paper as “incidental news” is
the predominant mode of information acquisition
among young consumers. This, in turn, raises major
editorial and political implications that we explore in
the last section of this paper.
2.!Related work
2.1.! News consumption in print and
broadcast media1
There has been a long tradition of scholarship on
the social and cultural character of news consumption
in print and broadcast media. Three consistent findings
are relevant for this study. They are that news
consumption in these media re highly routinized;
structured along predictable temporal and spatial
dimensions; and that they are integrated into the
relational patterns of daily life.
The habitualization of news consumption manifests
itself in at least two interrelated ways: the
interpenetration of the practices whereby people get the
news with those that pertain to other domains of daily
life, and the adoption of specific routines to organize
these practices. For instance, Gauntlett and Hill [21]
argued that sometimes people select channels and
shows less based on ideological affinity or quality and
more on their own temporal availability given
whatever else was going on in their day. Lull [33] adds
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1This research compares news consumption through social media to
news consumption on broadcast and print media. Consumption of
other types of content, such as fiction or entertainment, is organized
differently in both legacy and new media.
that in the home setting, viewing routines emerge
relatively rapidly within the television season and get
reproduced without much explicit discussion. Finally,
Bogart [9] notes that newspaper reading practices are
also habitualized, with many readers starting with the
front page and systematically going through the rest.
Studies of news consumption in print and broadcast
media have also underscored the organization of this
activity along spatial and temporal coordinates. The
default space of news consumption in these media has
been the home, in particular for television [14], [32],
[38], [45]. Webster and Phalen [53] note that this
shows up in audience ratings and program availability,
which increase at the end of the work day. By contrast,
radio and print news get also accessed in the transition
to and from work, in addition to the home space.
Moreover, for newspapers in particular, news
consumption increases during the weekend, especially
on Sunday [9]. These temporal patterns are fairly stable
but not fixed, since people availability affect them, in
particular the amount of leisure time available [21].
Finally, a host of studies have shown how the
practices of consuming news in print and broadcast
media are intertwined within the interactional patterns
of daily life [8], [11], [25], [34], [41], [42]. This
applies to television viewing and family conversations
[32], newspaper reading and workplace interactions
[9], and sociability outside of the home and work
environments [3], [28].
2.2.!News consumption in digital media
The advent of news on bulletin boards and online
services first, and then on the web, triggered the
emergence of scholarly research aimed at
understanding the dynamics of news consumption
using computerized devices [35], [36]. Two lines of
research are particularly relevant for present purposes:
whether the advent of online news complements or
displaces news consumption in print and broadcast
media; and whether online news consumption alters the
temporal and spatial coordinates of getting the news in
those media.
Concerning the former, the scholarship has been
divided into two opposing camps. One argues that the
consumption of online news complements that of print
and broadcast media [39], [40], [48], [51], [54]. The
alternative camp suggests that there is a displacement
effect whereby increased consumption of online news
decreases time and attention devoted to news in print
and broadcast media [17], [20], [22]. Of particular
relevance to this paper, the research shows that
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displacement is greater among better educated and
younger users [1], [13], [15], [16], [20].
Regarding the latter, the work of Boczkowski [5]
on the consumption of online news at work shows
patterns of both discontinuity and continuity with
respect to the consumption of news at home in print
and broadcast media. The research reveals two ideal
typical forms of news consumption, a “first visit”
which is habitualized, longer and usually earlier in the
day, and “subsequent visits” that are not habitualized,
much shorter in duration, and normally later in the day,
and are centered on getting news updates during breaks
from work. The “subsequent visits” are discontinuous
from the highly routinized forms of news consumption
in print and broadcast media. Patterns of news
consumption at work show the continued importance
of integrating this practice with broader interactional
patterns since many times a person consumes news to
talk about it with co-workers.
2.3.! Digital news consumption and social
media
Because the consumption of news on social media
is a relatively recent phenomenon, research on it is still
sparse. But there are two sets of issues emerging from
the existing literature that inform the current paper.
First is a general understanding of the dynamics of the
phenomenon. Second is the notion that news on social
media emerge from a novel set of practices called
“ambient journalism”.
Two findings from the handful of empirical studies
currently available on news consumption in social
media are particularly relevant for present purposes.
First, Bucholtz [10] found that increased news
consumption on social networking sites was tied to
decreased news consumption on other media platforms,
thus indirectly contributing towards a displacement
effect. Second, Shim and colleagues [43] showed that
use of mobile communication devices shapes news
consumption on social media. This is supported by the
conclusion from Choi’s [12] study that greater number
of mobile devices is correlated with more news being
consumed on social media.
Hermida [27] argued that the growth of social
media networks like Twitter led to the emergence of a
new form of always-on and ubiquitous awareness
system that he called “ambient journalism.” His
account focused on the production side of ambient
journalism and made assumptions about the audience
uptake and contributions to this new ecology of
information. Empirical research on what actually users
do when they engage with this new form of journalism
has been sparse. Hermida [26] noted the potential of
such research: “The extent to which such systems of
ambient journalism allow citizens to maintain an
awareness of the news events and the conversation
around them would be a fertile area for future study”.
The present study aims to contribute towards this goal.
3.!Methodology
This paper is based on sixteen open-ended
interviews with young (ages 18-29) consumers of
digital news in Argentina. The interviews were
conducted face-to-face by a team of research assistants
coordinated by the third author and supervised by the
first two. All but one of the interviews took place in the
city of Buenos Aires—the nation’s capital—and
surrounding towns between March and June, 2016; one
of them was led in the city of Córdoba. Interviewees
chose the location of the interviews, which lasted an
average of 45 minutes and were tape-recorded and
transcribed in their entirety.
Interviewees were recruited using a snowball
sampling technique adapted to the team approach to
data collection. That is, each research assistant invited
a distant contact to be interviewed by another research
assistant in the team. These contacts were diverse in
terms of gender. At the end of the interview, each
interviewee was requested names of three-to-five of
their acquaintances and the interviewer requested
permission to contact one or more of them for the
purposes of this study. On a random basis, some of
these acquaintances were approached and the others
were placed on a waiting list. This procedure was
repeated with each person who was subsequently
interviewed. The final sample consisted of 5 men and
11 women, and had a mean age of 22.8 years-old.
Based on their education level, which almost always
included pursuing a college degree, participants
belonged to upper or upper-middle socioeconomic
strata of society.
Data analysis began after the first few interviews
and continued in parallel with the data collection
process. The data were analyzed in a grounded theory
fashion. The authors read the transcripts, looking for
recurring themes in an iterative fashion until a
theoretical interpretation of the phenomena under study
emerged and gradually solidified [44].
4.!Findings
Drawing upon the texto-material perspective briefly
outlined in the Introduction, in this section we first
examine the key technological affordances in both
hardware and software that are implicated in online
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news consumption in social media by youth. Then we
look at the content practices associated with this mode
of news consumption. As will become evident in the
paragraphs that follow, users’ agency weaves together
these material and textual dimensions of media use.
4.1.!Material matters
When we asked interviewees to rank their everyday
use of screen devices, they almost invariably put
mobile phones at the top, followed by computers and
television sets. When we invited them to elaborate on
their respective rankings, they usually noted that
mobile phones were the most important screen device
for them because they used them more often than any
other device, and for a multiplicity of purposes—
including news consumption. By contrast, computers
and television sets were used much less frequently and
normally for a single-use purpose—instrumental goals
such as work and study for the former, and
entertainment for the latter. For instance, a 24-year-old
female undergraduate student shared that “my mobile
phone is what I use the most due to constant
communication, with family, friends, [and] my boss.
And then the computer. I use my computer a lot for
college, and also for my job” [P6]. In a similar vein, a
22-year-old female undergraduate student said that “I
use my computer almost exclusively for college stuff.
My mobile phone would be for a general use” [P9].
The primacy of the mobile phone shapes news
consumption among young people: the vast majority of
them said that it is through this device that they access
news stories on a regular basis. Furthermore, in most
cases this consumption is somewhat seamlessly
integrated with their use of social media. When they
visit Facebook, primarily, and Twitter, secondarily,
they encounter information about a news story and if it
catches their attention, they often click on the link to
find out more about the news. For instance, when
asked about the most recent time he had learned about
a news story, a 28-year-old male worker in the
commercial sector said “the truth is that I was on
Facebook and on my wall somebody shared a story, so
I clicked on the link because it interested me… It was
casual [news consumption] because that topic
interested me in particular. Otherwise, I do not
normally visit the sites of digital newspapers or things
like that” [P2]. Another interviewee shared a similar
practice, but also noted a certain spillover effect
whereby an incidental visit to a news site might lead to
more time spent looking at its content: “In general I go
[to a news site] through Facebook because somebody
shared an article… And then I look at the other
headlines and if there is one that catches my eye, I
click on the story” [P9].
To further understand the dynamics of incidental news
consumption it is worth noticing that most of our
interviewees do not see themselves as using social
media but as living in them, as a digital environment
that is akin to the urban and natural environments that
envelop their daily lives. A 19-year-old college student
put it as follows: “For two months I stopped using
Facebook. But then I realized that it was hard… One
always wants to fight against the system, but you can’t
live outside of it” [P16]. Another college student says
she is on social media “All the time. I grab my cell
phone and [look at them] all the time” [P15]. A 29-
year-old male worker in film production commented
that “you have to use [Facebook] because today it is
the way that you have to communicate” [P5].
Thus, in the same way that a person might run into
a forgotten acquaintance on the street or see a beautiful
bird while running in the park, our interviewees
encounter news while they spend their time living in
social media. For instance, a 19-year-old female
undergraduate student said that “I use Facebook every
day… Since I have a mobile phone, access [to
Facebook] is very easy, so you have a second to spare
and you look and find out information” [P3]. This
derivative character of news consumption on social
media is further reinforced by the algorithmic logic of
Facebook and the chronological logic of Twitter,
which add to erase the difference between a news story
produced by a media company and the posts about
funny kittens or vacation photos contributed by regular
users connected through Facebook and Twitter. The
worker in the commercial sector told the interviewer
that “I read what others share on Facebook because it
is now like a mass of information, or disinformation,
and there is a lot [of it] so I look at it quite a bit” [P8].
The combination of living in social media (instead
of using it more purposely and sporadically, as in the
case of print or broadcast media) and consuming news
incidentally on it (as opposed to doing it as a deliberate
and discreet habit) turns media frenzies into more
effective ways of capturing the attention of the young
population than what was the case with traditional
media. Viralization via Facebook sharing or Twitter
trending appears to make the public’s attention rapidly
coalesce. A 27-year-old female media producer
explained that she has two “mechanisms” that drive
which stories she reads: “One is because I have an a
priori interest… The other is because I see [a story]
replicated many times, usually on Facebook” [P10]. A
21-year-old female college graduate shared a similar
mechanism, in her case on Twitter: “I read the news
story about the person who killed someone in the
business district because I saw that ‘business district’
was a trending topic and so I wanted to see what’s
going on” [P1].
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4.2.!Content practices
The incidental news consumption on social media
is linked to acquiring information multiple times a day,
in an unroutinized fashion, spending very short periods
of time doing it, and reading the content partially. A
20-year-old female undergraduate student said that “I
read a story as I get into her car, then stop while I
travel, and when I get to college while I enter through
the building [where she has class] and read another
story” [P7]. Another interviewee, a 20-year-old female
college student, noted that “it isn’t that I have a set
amount of time that I devote [to news consumption]…
some days I don’t read anything and others I read
everything that shows up [on my social media feeds]”
[P4].
When they look at a story, most interviewees
describe a very superficial reading of the texts. A 22-
year-old female college student commented, “I read
the headline, the lead and then skim-read the content
[of the article]” [P9]. Another interviewee concurred:
“I do a scan of headlines, and if there is anything that
interests me a lot, then I click [on the story]” [P10]. In
some cases, these content practices elicit feelings of
guilt: “the truth is that I should read more [the news]”,
[P3] and “I don’t want to get to my job and realize that
something happened and I didn’t know” [P8]. But these
feelings of guilt do not seem to be powerful enough to
effect a change of practices.
It is worth comparing these content practices
associated with incidental news consumption with
those that prevail in the case of the consumption of
entertainment. In this latter case, our interviewees refer
to a suite of practices that takes place in relation to the
television or computer screen; appear to be intentional
and fairly differentiated—even in the presence of the
second screen phenomenon, focus primarily on the
material on the screen; and is longer in duration than in
case of news. For instance, a 20-year-old female
college student said that “if I have time to sit down and
watch a movie or a television show, I go to the TV, or
otherwise on the computer” [P4]. As the previous
participant noted, devoting significant time to
consuming entertainment implies some degree of
scheduling. This seems to be related to a connection
between consuming entertainment content and pleasure
that is absent in the case of news: “the moment of
saying, ‘hey, how about if we see a chapter of this
[television show]?’ is very enjoyable. It doesn’t have to
do with everyday routines or anything like that, but
with something [enjoyable] that we allow ourselves [to
experience]” [P10].
5.!Discussion
The interviews with sixteen young users of digital
media reveal that news consumption on social media
can be captured with the label of “incidental news”.
They encounter news items, rather than actively
looking for them, as part of their constant connection
through social media, often through their mobile
devices. This mode of access un-differentiates news
from other types of information content, such as
postings from friends and family on social media feeds.
It also is tied to a low degree of attention to journalistic
information: young users click on news items
sporadically, if at all, and engage with them only
superficially on most occasions.
The incidental mode of news consumption on
social media runs counter to the findings about high
routinization of news consumption on print, broadcast,
and to a somewhat lesser extent, on the web. There was
no trace of stable temporal and spatial patterns in news
access among the subjects of this study, little
predictability either for themselves or for content
producers. Boczkowski [5] examined the transition of
news consumption on print and broadcast at the home
space and at leisure time to the web, at the time and
place of work. This transition included the combination
of a first visit, relatively long, planned, highly
habitualized—akin to the routinization of print and
broadcast news consumption at home—with
subsequent, shorter visits to news sites to get updates
during brief and mostly unplanned breaks at work.
Incidental news access resonates with these subsequent
visits, without the grounding of the first visit.
Moreover, the location of accessing news content has
moved from home and work to everywhere and
nowhere in particular at the same time. News
consumption on social media via mobile devices is no
longer structured along the ebbs and flows of the
workday, but rather interspersed throughout the day
without the predictability that characterized access to
news in print newspapers, radio, television, and
computers.
The analysis of incidental news strengthens the
centrality of the integration of media consumption with
the social interactions in daily life, but puts a new spin
on it. For the participants, sociability is not only
facilitated by using media and news as social currency,
exchanged at the water cooler at work or social events;
it is also conducted within social media, seamlessly
integrating information from friends, co-workers and
family with editorial content curated by a combination
of friendship networks and the algorithms of social
media platforms. That is, consumers are presented with
news items in part because their friends post about
them but also in part because social media and news
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companies push that content. Connection between
media and sociability is furthered by social contacts
sharing news items and posting comments about them,
all through the same mobile device, permanently in the
hands or the pockets of participants. Our interviewees
show the extent to which news and sociability are
always just a swipe away, un-differentiated and
inextricably linked on social media.
The centrality of news consumption on social
media signals what might become a definitive turn
from the complementarity of time spent consuming
news between print and broadcast media with online
news, to digital sources displacing “old” media—
particularly among young audiences. The mobile
device has become the main connection with the world
of information, while television appears to be relegated
mostly for entertainment, and the computer for work
and study purposes. Print artifacts seem almost entirely
absent from young people’s news repertoire. This
constant, low-grade level of awareness of news
illustrates how the concept of ambient journalism
hypothesized by Hermida [26] works on the ground,
and points to a radically new ecology of information.
In this new environment, the cost of getting audiences’
sustained attention is raised for routine news—which is
most of the news that is produced and consumed—but
might be dramatically lowered for events triggering
media frenzies, thus putting a new spin on the
normative model of journalism sounding burglar
alarms when important events for the polity take place
[55]. This new ecology of information also lowers the
bar for sharing and commenting on everyday life
events, although these events might not necessarily be
the most newsworthy in the old media environment, of
highly routinized and bureaucratically focused news.
The increasing prevalence of what we have
described as “incidental news” consumption on social
media among youth creates several challenges for
professional content producers, two of which we would
like to highlight. The first one is the demise of a
privileged place of news in the informational
hierarchy, which is in turn linked to news organizations
losing their agenda-setting power [4], [7], [46]. The
weakening of agenda-setting is compounded with the
de-intermediation effects of users following politicians,
sports stars, show-business personalities and other
news makers directly on social networks. It is also
compounded by the re-intermediation consequences of
respondents accessing news content through the
recommendation—shares or retweets—of friends,
family or other social media contacts, in a re-
versioning of the two-step flow process proposed by
Katz and Lazarsfeld [29] more than sixty years ago.
6.!Conclusion
In this paper we have examined the consumption of
news in social media among youth. Our account shows
the emergence of a novel ideal-typical mode of news
consumption that what we have called “incidental
news” and that has become the dominant mode of
information acquisition for this segment of the
population: news content encountered on mobile
devices while visiting social media sites, in a process
that is derivative of social media interactions rather
than deliberately sought for—as opposed to the
consumption of entertainment content on television. In
this novel mode of news consumption young
consumers are surrounded by news content that is
undifferentiated from other types of content on their
social media feeds. They are exposed to them
constantly but clicked on sporadically and very little
time is devoted to reading or watching the stories. We
have argued that the emergence of incidental news
signals a major discontinuity with the information
ecologies associated with the consumption of news on
print and broadcast media—and, to a lesser extent,
with the consumption on news sites via laptop or
desktop computers—and elaborated on its key editorial
and political implications.
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