IEEE Access (Jan 2021)

Effects of Incidental Brief Exposure to News on News Knowledge While Scrolling Through Videos

  • Masanori Takano,
  • Yuki Ogawa,
  • Fumiaki Taka,
  • Soichiro Morishita

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3063484
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9
pp. 37772 – 37783

Abstract

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Increasing media choices due to online media diversification ensure that people without any interest in news avoid news media. This obstructs the construction of a shared social reality given the presence of politics news seekers and news avoiders. For mitigating these issues using media, incidental exposure to news on the Internet can be a powerful tool because it can bring news to the awareness of people who are politically disinterested. We studied the effects of the glimpsing a news screen for less than a few seconds while watching online television news, termed incidental brief exposure, on news knowledge. For evaluating the effects, we combined the logs of news-watching behavior on an online television (for incidental brief exposure) and the results of a questionnaire survey (for news knowledge and media repertories). We found that this incidental brief exposure mitigated the negative effect of social media usage on news knowledge. Although people with heavy social media usage have low news knowledge, heavy social media users with high frequently incidental brief exposure have more news knowledge than heavy social media users. As a possible scenario, memorizing news keywords due to incidental brief exposure may facilitate reading news related to these keywords when users incidentally encounter news on social media. On the other hand, the exposure did not moderate the effects of news media usage, such as mass media, curation sites, and online news sites. These findings suggest that incidental brief exposure while scrolling through videos, which is hardly noticed by users, enhances passive exposure effects in non-news media, such as social media.

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