Media and Online Behavior
Understanding the Evolving Online Learning Landscape
The internet is central to how people learn new information, but everyone doesn’t find and access online resources, especially about religion and science, in the same way. In Social Media + Society, University of Zurich media scholar and IPR adjunct Eszter Hargittai and Will Marler of Tilberg University assess where people turn online for knowledge about science and religion, what are the strategies they use to learn, and what shapes how people decide between them. The researchers interviewed 45 people in the United States from 21 states across a range of religious identities and levels of religiosity. They asked the participants about their religious and science-related backgrounds, level of interest in each topic, and how they used the internet to learn about religion and science. Using search engines and specific websites or applications for content in each domain were common ways of looking up information, but searching for information on one’s own was the most popular. People’s personal networks, online and offline, were also important avenues for incidental learning, including friends’ social media posts. Participants used fewer resources to learn new information about religion compared to science, and they turned to other people as resources for more subjective information about religion and those they trusted and regarded as experts about science. The findings suggest that researchers should pay attention to how people’s personal networks can shape learning opportunities, and future research should examine larger sample sizes.
How Audiences Make Sense of the Media Landscape
As the media landscape has widened with the creation of many niche media organizations, not all news outlets are equal. In Digital Journalism, media scholar and IPR associate Stephanie Edgerly studies how audiences understand the media environment and give meaning to different media organizations. In one study, she analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of 1,502 adults who were on average 46 years old, majority female (53.4%), and White (80.6%). The survey asked participants to compare 13 different media organizations, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, Drudge Report, and Breitbart, and rate how similar they were to one another. In a second study, Edgerly conducted in-depth interviews with 18 adults over a three-month period starting in March 2020 and asked participants about their media habits and attitudes about the media. The participants also completed a survey comparing the same 13 media organizations as in the first study. The two studies reveal that audiences who were not regular consumers of news and uninterested in politics used media genre, such as hard news or entertainment, to compare media organizations. Participants who were avid news consumers, politically interested, and partisan used political orientation to categorize news organizations. The results show how audience’s sensemaking of the media reflects the larger U.S. media system, including its politicization, and how making sense of the media landscape is personal to an individual’s lived experiences.
Why Do People Still Read Print Newspapers?
