Shedding light on the dark social: The connective role of news and journalism in social media communities

Abstract

Messaging apps and Facebook groups are increasingly significant in everyday life, shaping not only interpersonal communication but also how people orient themselves to public life. These "dark social media" are important spaces for "public connection," a means for bridging people's private worlds and everything beyond. This article analyzes how people perceive news on such platforms, focusing on the different roles it plays in key social networks that rely on dark social media for communication. Arguing that the use of these platforms is foremost a social practice, the study employs focus groups with local, work, and leisure-related communities to investigate questions of inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness associated with sharing and discussing news. We find the perceived value of news on dark social media hinges on the control and privacy it provides. Community type was less significant than communicative aims of the group for shaping the uptake of news and journalism.

Beyond the Here and Now of News Audiences: A Process-Based Framework for Investigating News Repertoires

“…From social media feeds where news and personal updates interweave in a virtual environment based on algorithmic personalization (Bruns, 2017), to the continued growth of smartphones as a media device (Newman et al, 2018), to the gradual emergence of "dark" social media platforms (i.e. messaging apps) to discuss public affairs (Swart, Peters & Broersma, 2018), how people are socialized to see, share, and talk about news is undergoing a radical transformation. The individualization of media devices, fragmentation of outlets, and personalization of consumption increasingly renders news use a personally-visible, but publicly-invisible practice.…”

“…Tentatively, we may say that a news repertoire changes when one or more of these considerations underlying the worthwhileness balance causes the repertoire to "recompose". To go back to the exemplar raised in the introduction, recent qualitative (Swart, Peters & Broersma, 2018) and quantitative (Newman et al, 2018: 12) studies have shown that "dark" social media platforms are becoming increasingly popular to share and discuss news, with people finding they "offer more convenience, greater privacy, and less opportunity to be misunderstood." In this way, new media alternatives sometimes act as replacements while other times they are complementary.…”

(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News

“…This is the kind of engagement that affects people, that perhaps changes views and behaviours and therefore has democratic impact. This kind of engagement can manifest itself as technical engagement, but-as audience research has clearly shown (e.g., Swart, Peters, and Broersma 2018; Ytre-Arne and Moe 2018)-quite often it does not. The perhaps somewhat banal but nonetheless crucial point is that people can be emotionally engaged with news even if they do not participate in it by creating content, commenting, sharing or liking news stories online.…”

Las Periodistas Paramos in Spain: Professional, feminist Internet activism

“…Feminism saw the Internet as an opportunity for freedom, emancipation and equality (Colley and Maltby, 2008; Haraway, 1998; Plant, 1997), as a safe space (Clark-Parsons, 2018), its control and privacy (Swart et al, 2018) even though it was aware of structural limitations such as access, cost, literacy and sexism (Eudey, 2012). This is why some feminist theorists (De Miguel and Boix, 2002; Mohanty and Samantaray, 2017) conclude that cyberfeminism is one of the keys to a new social and economic order, one in which the role of women is constructively redefined.…”