Abstract
This paper presents the results of a diary study involving 49 university students reporting how they consume and react to news via their mobile phones. In their diary entries, participants used 23 pairs of semantic differential scales to express their reactions. Out of 265 political and society news items submitted, 68 were inclusion/exclusion-related news. The most frequent categories of inclusion/exclusion news were related to “ethnicity/race,” “gender/sexual orientation,” and “religion,” and these three groups of news items counted for over 85% of all inclusion/exclusion related news that were submitted. Significant differences were found in participants’ choices of semantic adjectives between inclusion news and exclusion news, as well as between inclusion/exclusion news and general news. Findings provide an insightful understanding of the interests, value judgment, and emotional attachments of university students in the US to inclusion/exclusion and to general news.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Li, X.: Technology facility and news affinity: predictors of using mobile phones as a news device. In: Xu, X. (ed.) Interdisciplinary Mobile Media and Communications: Social, Political, and Economic Implications, pp. 278–304 (2014)
Barthel, M., Mitchell, A.: Americans’ attitudes about the news media deeply divided along partisan lines. Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2017)
Pew Research Center: State of the news media 2015. Washington, D.C. (2015)
Pew Research Center: State of the news media 2016. Washington, D.C. (2016)
Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., et al.: Understanding the participatory news consumer: how internet and cell phone users have turned news into a social experience. Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (2010)
O’Brien, H., Freund, L., Westman, S.: What motivates the online news browser? News item selection in a social information seeking scenario. Inf. Res. 19(3) (2017). http://www.informationr.net/ir/19-3/paper634.html#.V8ssaFQrKM8
Struckmann, S., Karnowski, V.: News consumption in a changing media ecology: an MESM study on mobile news. Telematics Inform. 33(2), 309–319 (2016)
Sung, H., Parboteeah, P.: Diversity-related research reported in high-impact library and information science journal literature: a content analysis. Libr. Inf. Sci. Res. 39(2), 77–84 (2017)
Hastings, S.: If diversity is a natural state, why don’t our libraries mirror the populations they serve? Libr. Q. 85, 133–138 (2015)
Subramaniam, M., Rodriguez-Mori, H., Jaeger, P., Hill, R.: The implications of a decade of diversity-related doctoral dissertations (2000–2009) in LIS: supporting inclusive library practices. Libr. Q. 82(3), 361–377 (2012)
Schemer, C.: The influence of news media on stereotypic attitudes toward immigrants in a political campaign. J. Commun. 62, 739–757 (2012)
Dixon, T.: Network news and racial beliefs: exploring the connection between national television news exposure and stereotypical perceptions of African Americans. J. Commun. 58, 321–337 (2008)
Benesch, C.: An empirical analysis of the gender gap in news consumption. J. Media Econ. 25, 147–167 (2012)
Uriarte, C., Valgeirsson, G.: Institutional disconnects as obstacles to diversity in journalism in the United States. Journalism Pract. 9(3), 399–417 (2015)
Osgood, C., Suci, G., Tannenbaum, P.: The Measurement of Meaning. University of Illinois Press, Urbana (1957)
Scott Jr., W.: The development of semantic differential scales as measures of “morale”. Pers. Psychol. 20(2), 179–198 (1967)
Katzer, J.: The development of a semantic differential to assess users’ attitudes towards an on-line interactive reference retrieval system. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 23(2), 122–128 (1972)
Ajzen, I., Timko, C.: Correspondence between health attitudes and behavior. Basic Appl. Soc. Psychol. 7(4), 259–276 (1986)
Khan, K.: User experience in mobile phones by using semantic differential methodology. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems Management and Evaluation, Cork, Ireland, pp. 143–150 (2012)
Takahashi, H., Terada, K., Morita, T., et al.: Different impressions of other agents obtained through social interaction uniquely modulate dorsal and ventral pathway activities in the social human brain. Cortex 58, 289–300 (2014)
Takahashi, H., Ban, M., Asada, M.: Semantic differential scale method can reveal multi-dimensional aspects of mind perception. Front. Psychol. 7(1717), 1–5 (2016)
Acknowledgments
This research study was funded by The Emily Hollowell Research Fund and Mara Dole Innovation Fund from the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons University. We wish to thank Alison Fisher for her assistance in participant recruitment and data collection. We would also like to thank all the participants of the study.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Oh, K.E., Tang, R. (2019). Mobile News Processing: University Students’ Reactions to Inclusion/Exclusion-Related News. In: Taylor, N., Christian-Lamb, C., Martin, M., Nardi, B. (eds) Information in Contemporary Society. iConference 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_30
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15741-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15742-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)