Effects of the News-Finds-Me Perception in Communication: Social Media Use Implications for News Seeking and Learning About Politics

Abstract

With social media at the forefront of today's media context, citizens may perceive they don't need to actively seek news because they will be exposed to news and remain well-informed through their peers and social networks. We label this the "news-finds-me

Social network sites and acquiring current affairs knowledge: The impact of Twitter and Facebook usage on learning about the news

“…In sum, the expectations about SNS in general are mixed and this is also reflected in the literature. Whereas some studies found positive effects of social network use (Beam, Hutchens, & Hmielowski, 2016;Lee & Oh, 2013;Yoo & Gil de Zúñiga, 2014), others found negative or null effects (Dimitrova et al, 2014;Gil de Zúñiga, Weeks, & Ardèvol-Abreu, 2017;Lee et al, 2017;Shehata & Strömbäck, 2018). Besides differences in research design (i.e., ability to disentangle causality) or operationalizations of knowledge, the contradictions in findings may partly relate to the measurement of independent variables (Ohme, 2018): Logically, general time measurements yield less positive findings than those measurements that tap the intention to acquire information online.…”

“…The increased choice of content offered by social media, by contrast, forms a potential distraction (see Yoo & Gil de Zúñiga, 2014) for citizens without much interest in the news (Bonfadelli, 2002): These people will choose not to follow many journalistic or political accounts. By still accidentally being confronted with news items in their timelines that friends share or retweet, they are likely to develop a "news-finds-me perception" (Gil de Zúñiga et al, 2017) together with a feeling of already being sufficiently informed (Müller et al, 2016). Hence, social media usage may further discourage uninterested citizens to expose themselves to news coverage (Lee et al, 2017), which probably results in negative consequences for the amount of current affairs knowledge that these citizens eventually will acquire (Gil de Zúñiga et al, 2017).…”

“…By still accidentally being confronted with news items in their timelines that friends share or retweet, they are likely to develop a "news-finds-me perception" (Gil de Zúñiga et al, 2017) together with a feeling of already being sufficiently informed (Müller et al, 2016). Hence, social media usage may further discourage uninterested citizens to expose themselves to news coverage (Lee et al, 2017), which probably results in negative consequences for the amount of current affairs knowledge that these citizens eventually will acquire (Gil de Zúñiga et al, 2017). Moreover, with regards to the news to which people are (accidentally) exposed on social network sites, the interested citizens will be better able to understand, store and memorize this.…”

Broadening Exposure to Socio-Political Opinions via a Pushy Smart Home Device

“…Despite Spkr's focus on a single topic per day, several participants detailed they came to rely on it as their key source of news, as they knew it would be active at certain times of the day, such as when they got home. While this is somewhat problematic in that the single-story per day focus of Spkr may in fact reduce awareness of news overall, it presents one solution to the "news-finds-me" attitude, where users do not actively follow the news, but expect the platforms they use to expose them to all relevant and important news [32].…”

Public debate in the media matters: evidence from the European refugee crisis

“…A number of studies have shown that individuals experience a sense of self-gratification by sharing news on social media [40][41][42]. In addition to suppliers of news, social media is the key means by which individuals consume news information, whether or not this is intentional or incidental [43][44][45][46]. While the debate on how social media affects news dissemination is still ongoing, one dynamic that has relevance for our study is that social media has been found to polarize those news that do end up in public debate.…”