Lee, et al. (2017). The Effects of News Consumption via Social Media and News Information Overload on Perceptions of Journalistic Norms and Practices. (Gareth)

From Digital Culture & Society

The ubiquitous nature of social media in contemporary societies has pushed it to the forefront of popular culture and scholarly research or literature. One of the most significant influences held by social media over contemporary society can be seen in the news media industry. Modern digital media, lead by social media platforms, have forced into the contemporary news industry, dramatically altering everything from the individual consumer to the creation and delivery of content. As news content increasingly appears on social media platforms, the relationship between the contemporary news industry, social media, and individual news consumers and social media users, becomes increasingly complex. The modern news consumer, using social media to access content, is encountering an unprecedented amount of news information, raising several areas of concern and inquiry. This plethora of news content delivered via social media platforms has altered the very nature of news consumption and production. Several scholars have researched the vast amount of modern news content and the changing nature of news consumption and production. Lee, Lindsey, and Kim (2017) contribute to this area of scholarly literature by focusing on the ways in which the surplus of news content found on social media platforms alters the way consumers engage content and view journalistic standards and practices.

Social media is an excellent tool for the access to, consumption of, and engagement with various news media. While social media offers plenty of promising opportunities in regards to news consumption and engagement, it also brings forth several new problems and issues. One of the most prominent issues with the relatively new relationship between the contemporary news industry and social media is the overabundance of news content social media users are constantly encountering on these platforms. Social media is often criticized for the nature of its news content as being brief, ambiguous, or biased, which is believed to weaken one’s ability to discern between objectivity, fact, inference, and propaganda (Lee, Lindsey & Kim, 2017). This criticism inherently places value on the ways in which consumers are able to access and navigate the increasingly complex news landscape found on social media platforms. The authors of this study work to explain how this plethora of convoluted news content affects the ways in which audiences consume news information and how they perceive contemporary news media.

The authors hypothesized that the degree to which a social media user felt overwhelmed by news content would moderate the relationships between their news access via social media and news consumption patterns or habits, such as selective exposure and news avoidance. This is to say that the amount of news information a consumer encounters affects the ways in which this news content is consumed or engaged, as well as the ways modern news companies & the industry as a whole are perceived. The results of their study generally support this moderation hypothesis as respondents who felt overwhelmed by news content on social media reverted to specific consumption behaviours such as selective exposure to only a few news sources or more general news avoidance. It was also hypothesized that the effect of accessing news via social media on the perceptions of journalistic norms and practices would depend on the degree to which they felt overloaded by news information. It was found that participants who accessed news information more frequently on social media were less trusting of the ethics and objectivity of journalism, especially if they felt overwhelmed by too much news content. Those who felt highly overloaded with news tended to agree more with the idea that more time needs to be spent on producing accurate news through investigative reporting, while those who did not feel overloaded disagreed with this idea. These findings highlight important observations about social media news consumers: those feeling overwhelmed with news content are more concerned with quality over quantity, while those less overloaded valued the speed and quantity of digital news content. This also highlights current trends within digital news media, such as the proliferation of “fake news” as consumers who prefer rapid delivery of news via social media may not take enough time and effort to confirm the validity of the content and the credibility of the source.

The observations made by Lee, Lindsey, and Kim (2017) work to explain several trends found within the complex relationship between social media and news content, especially as this relationship becomes more prevalent across society. By focusing on the ways in which the plethora of news content encountered by social media users affects their consumption practices and their perception of modern news media, this complex relationship can be more thoroughly understood. Lee, Lindsey, and Kim (2017) expand on previous literature revolving around evolving news consumption practices by focusing on the nuances that relate the unprecedented amounts of news information that is found on social media daily. The insights provided in this study assist the modern news consumer trying to navigate the complex relationship between news content and social media.