2022
DOI: 10.1177/19401612221082074
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Judging Value in a Time of Information Cacophony: Young Adults, Social media, and the Messiness of do-it-Yourself Expertise

Abstract: In this paper, we explore U.S. young adults’ strategies for evaluating news and information value within the rapidly changing, increasingly digitalized media environment. We draw on interviews with U.S. young adults conducted between April and November 2020. Based on our findings, we develop the concept of information cacophony to characterize young adults’ experience of the contemporary information environment. Information cacophony is characterized by the jarring noise of many, discordant voices offering up … Show more

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Cited by 15 publications
(4 citation statements)
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References 33 publications
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“…People indicate that they long for the times before polarization and social unrest, uttering that pre Social Media, it was possible to enter a meaningful conversation instead of the current online public spaces that are noisy, overcrowded fora where no meaningful conversation can be held. This resonates with recent studies (Nematzadeh et al 2019;Cotter and Thorson 2022) on how people experience online platforms, in which they are often exposed to too much information to process. This phenomenon is coined information cacophony.…”
Section: Conceptual Overlap Between Populism and Nostalgiasupporting
confidence: 78%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…People indicate that they long for the times before polarization and social unrest, uttering that pre Social Media, it was possible to enter a meaningful conversation instead of the current online public spaces that are noisy, overcrowded fora where no meaningful conversation can be held. This resonates with recent studies (Nematzadeh et al 2019;Cotter and Thorson 2022) on how people experience online platforms, in which they are often exposed to too much information to process. This phenomenon is coined information cacophony.…”
Section: Conceptual Overlap Between Populism and Nostalgiasupporting
confidence: 78%
“…The jarring noise of many, discordant voices offering up information, under conditions of low media trust and an absence of a pre-defined epistemic hierarchy of sources makes it difficult for people to know what to believe. Cotter and Thorson (2022) demonstrates that people's strategies for evaluating information are deeply entangled with the sociality and emotionality of the experience of information cacophony.…”
Section: Conceptual Overlap Between Populism and Nostalgiamentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Moreover, social media have become a major source of news consumption (Infield 2020). This mode of news consumption is an “information cacophony,” characterized by “the jarring noise of many, discordant voices offering up information, under conditions of low media trust” (Cotter and Thorson 2022: 630).…”
Section: The Protest Paradigm In a Digital Media Ecosystemmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This work is increasingly important as people now tend to receive more political messages from non-political sources than from political sources online (Wojcieszak et al, 2023). As fewer people regularly consume news media, lifestyle influencers creating aspirational content have the potential to reach a broad range of individuals, particularly younger and less politically engaged audiences who are often overwhelmed by news media and rely on trusted influencers for political information (Cotter & Thorson, 2022;Harff, 2022;Schmuck et al, 2022).…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%