“News comes across when I’m in a moment of leisure”: Understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media

Abstract

Incidental consumption of news on social media has risen in recent years, particularly among young people. Previous studies have characterized what the main dimensions and effects of this phenomenon are. In this article, we complement that literature by looking at how this phenomenon unfolds. Inspired by practice theory, we aim to answer two questions: (1) what are the practices that subtend incidental news consumption on social media among young people? and (2) What are the social consequences of these practices? We draw upon 50 in-depth interviews with respondents aged 18–29 years from Argentina. Our findings show the existence of (1) strong connections between technology and content, “anywhere and anytime” coordinates, derivative information routines, and increasingly mediated sociability and (2) fragmentary reading patterns, loss of hierarchy of the news, and coexistence of editorial, algorithmic, and social filtering. We conclude by elaborating on the empirical and theoretical implications of these findings.

The Reception of Fake News: The Interpretations and Practices That Shape the Consumption of Perceived Misinformation

“…Others have focused on online-specific behaviors such as sharing, liking, and commenting (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2012;Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2015;Hermida et al 2012;Kormelink & Meijer, 2018). Scholarship has found an increase in incidental news consumption as a by-product of spending time on social media (Boczkowski et al 2018; Fletcher and Nielsen 2017; Gil de Zuniga, Weeks and Ardevol-Abreu 2017). Also with a focus on social media and news practices, recent studies have focused on how news can be more easily avoided and how this can affect political variables in a democracy (Gil de Z uñiga, Jung, and Valenzuela 2012; Woodstock 2014)-a body of work with inconsistent results (Ksiazek et al 2010).…”

Imagine All the People: Negotiating and Mediating Moral Concern through Intergroup Encounters

“…In fact, social media users may accidentally come across a larger range of items than they would have encountered in mass media alone (Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, & Matassi, 2018): "citizen media has turned newssharing and news engagement via social media into a habitual practice for ordinary users, and has led to the establishment of a social media-supported ambient news network that enables serendipitous news discovery" (Bruns, 2018: 309). Such "incidental" consumption of images and texts from a range of sources by ordinary people means that the media's role in connective habituation to the presence of strangers-of others different to one's self and one's group-has not been technologically superseded in the digital age.…”

Mediatizing the Holy Community—Ultra-Orthodoxy Negotiation and Presentation on Public Social-Media

“…Paradoxically, these public platforms often bring about splitting of users into separate, almost exclusive, publics (Boczkowski et al 2018;Vaidhyanathan 2018), fostering echo chambers (Pariser 2011) that can be divided by regional or denominational cleavages. This aspect has been understudied among religious groups, and it relates to the ways that SNS promotes or hinders social solidarity, particularly within insular groups.…”