No abstract

News is increasingly being consumed on a multitude of media devices, including mobile devices. In recent years, mobile news consumption has permeated individuals’ news consumption repertoires. The main purpose of this study is twofold: (a) gain insight in how mobile news outlets infiltrated the broader news media repertoires of mobile device owners and (b) understand in what circumstances mobile news is consumed within these news media repertoires. The key is to understand how and why this widening agency in appropriating various places and social spaces in everyday life relates to general news media consumption (Peters, 2012). This two-phased study aims to illuminate how mobile device owners position their mobile news consumption in relation to other types of news media outlets. First, a guiding cluster analysis of a large-scale questionnaire ( N = 1279) was performed, indicating three types of news consumers. Second, in order to thicken the originally derived clusters, a mixed-method study was set up, combining objective data originating from mobile device logs with more subjective audience constructions through personal diaries and face-to-face interviews ( N = 30). This study reveals the Janus-faced nature of mobile news. On the one hand, the majority of news consumers dominantly relies on traditional media outlets to stay informed, only to supplement with online mobile services in specific circumstances. Even then, there is at least a tendency to stick to trusted brand materials. On the other hand, these mobile news outlets/products do seem to increasingly infiltrate the daily lives of mobile audiences who were previously disengaged with news.

Scholarly work argues that mobile technology facilitates serendipitous news consumption. This article examines how users understand serendipity in mobile news consumption and whether this leads to news diversity. Technology-mediated news encounters are argued to reduce news diversity, yet these theoretical filter bubbles cannot be found empirically. This paper investigates whether this might be explained by incidental news use. A mixed methods study (n=20) was set up, which involved interviews, on-device loggings and experience sampling data. Results show that incidental news differs in the level of user agency, ranging from responding to an unsolicited recommendation or alert; via monitoring, facilitated by a previous action (e.g. activated news notifications); to browsing or stumbling upon unexpected topics during news use. Incidental encounters become serendipitous when they provide new information or insights and consequently stick in one's mind. Based on our findings, we further develop a conceptual model for (mobile) incidental news, which shows the interplay of news recommendations by peers, algorithms, and editors. Editorial recommendations result in topic diversity. Both peer and algorithmic recommendations lead to brand diversity, yet this remains unnoticed to audiences. Peer recommendations mostly do not lead to topic or viewpoint diversity, but are perceived as valuable when they do.

The ever-connected world created by smartphones has led to initiatives like a 'digital detox', in which smartphone users consciously disconnect from email, social media and internet in general for a certain period of time. Since research based on subjective self-reports indicates that extensive smartphone usage and stress are often related, we checked whether a digital detox is effectively associated with a decrease in stress in the short-term and whether this could be measured with objective markers of both smartphone usage and physiological stress. More particularly, we monitored participants for two consecutive weeks: one week of normal smartphone usage and one week of digital detox. We asked them to continuously wear a state-of-the-art wristband device, measuring physiological stress based on skin conductance (SC). In addition, we developed an app called 'mobileDNA' to capture detailed information on which apps participants use throughout the day and how much time they spend on them. Although this was a pilot study with a rather low sample size, we found decreased levels of stress during a digital detox week. This finding provides evidence that a digital detox can be an interesting coping mechanism for people experiencing problematic smartphone usage and that further and more extensive research with our methodology has a lot of potential in the future.