Here's the link to the conference website. http://aejmcctec.com/midwinter/
Remember that the deadline for Abstract submissions is Dec. 1, 2013, and you don't have anything to loose.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
The more information we have, the less we know
News overload has
been a research focus in the information age. Abundant news media compete for
user’s attention. Information is no more a scarce resource, on the contrary,
user’s attention becomes scarce. Perhaps the more information users have, the
less they know due to news fatigue.
Earlier studies examined the factors
influencing news overload(Holton &
Chyi, 2012). Other studies also looked into the effect
of news overload(York, 2013). Those studies address the influence on
perception and attitude. Few study look into the impact of news overload on
behavior (news consumption). As a result, I want to focus on how has news
overload affected news consumption/media selection.
Previous study indicates that the more
exposure to news, the more people feel overload(York, 2013). It is important to see that will the
feeling of new overload lead to selective exposure. If the relationship between
news overload and selective exposure is positive, the implication would be that
the more information news organization provide, the less readers will get.
On the other hand, readers
are assumed to be “Consumer sovereignty”, which means readers can
search the information based on their interest(Chyi,2009), in other words, readers should
be more informed among overabundance information. Thus, based on the assumption
of “consumer sovereignty”, readers tend to select the information they are
interested or the information they need, rather than being overwhelmed. Thus
here comes the hypothesis that
H1: the feeling of news overload is positive associated with selective
perception
H2: the feeling of news overload is positive associated with selective
exposure.
Previous study has
proved that the positive relationship between news overload and news exposure,
it is also important to know what would the news overload influence media use. Some
study mentioned news segment and nichfication(Nordenson,
2008), but they didn’t points out the
relationship between news overload and news segment or nichfication. It might
be critical to examine the relationship between news overload and news segment
or nichfication, which means, news overload may not be that bad. Readers know
how to find what they need among overabundance information. Thus the media use
under news overload is worthy to examine.
RQ1: What is the
relationship between news overload and multiplatform news use.
RQ2: What
kind of news media (news paper,
TV news, online news, mobile news) will users tend to use under the feeling of news overload
RQ3: Will the
users who feel less news overload tend to use more news media than the users
who feel more news overload
Based on the previous research, more news
exposure leads to the feeling of news overload. However, users may avoid too
much information. Since there are the most information on the Internet. Comparing to
the Internet, there are less information on the traditional media, so here come
another hypothesis that
H3: the more
feeling of news overload, users tend not to use Internet to get the news in
order to avoid too much information.
H4: the more
feeling of news overload, users tend to read newspaper to get the news rather
than using Internet.
Chyi, Hsiang Iris. 2009. “Information Surplus in the Digital
Age: Impact and
Implications.” In Journalism and
Citizenship: New Agendas, edited by Zizi
Papacharissi,
91–107. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Doyle, G. (2010). From Television to Multi-Platform: Less
from More or More for Less? Convergence: The International Journal of
Research into New Media Technologies, 16(4), 431–449.
doi:10.1177/1354856510375145
Holton, A. E.,
& Chyi, H. I. (2012). News and the overloaded consumer: factors influencing
information overload among news consumers. Cyberpsychology, behavior and
social networking, 15(11), 619–24. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0610
Nordenson, B.
(2008). Overload ! Columbia Journalism Review, (December), 30–42.
York, C.
(2013). Overloaded By the News: Effects of News Exposure and Enjoyment on
Reporting Information Overload. Communication Research Reports, 30(4),
282–292. doi:10.1080/08824096.2013.836628
Friday, November 1, 2013
When Temporal Physics and Journalism Collide
Something that may be under-appreciated about new media, at least in the present time, is its capacity to serve as a digital record of a person's lifespan content.
In 1984, I was a student at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) and working as sports editor of The Daily Helmsman, the four-day-per-week campus newspaper. At the time, Memphis State's men's basketball team was a top 25 powerhouse, reaching the NCAA Final Four in 1985 before losing to eventual national champion Villanova.
That meant I got to cover a lot of home games that were also being nationally televised. It was a rather exciting scene for a 19-year-old journalist, but I was more focused on my work for the campus newspaper during each game and didn't think much about games once they were completed, unless it was to review statistics or consider an angle for an upcoming article. As time passed and I moved on to other places and people to write about, I gave little, if any, thought about my basketball beat at Memphis State.
But that was before this occurred last weekend:
While on YouTube after looking at a college basketball-related link, I unexpectedly discovered that someone had uploaded several full game broadcasts of Memphis State basketball from 1984 and 1985. Although you can't make out the faces in the background (this was well before HD broadcasting), I am one of the people sitting at the media table between both team benches in these videos. As I began watching the game and the TV camera panned across the court, I became acutely aware of what I was experiencing -- here I was in Austin, Texas, in 2013, watching a college basketball game that I was also watching in Memphis, Tennessee, nearly 30 years earlier. Not only that, but my present self was watching my past self watch the game, and my past self was sitting there on press row with no idea that his future self would one day be watching the same game through technology that didn't exist yet and a concept called "new media."
Granted, it's not exactly the same game; one is a live event, the other is an electronic recording of the event. However, it does provide a strange type of parallax effect, psychologically and sensorially. The content is the same and so is much of the stimuli - things like the sounds of the pep band playing, the sight of players running back and forth on the court, and the feelings of drama and excitement as the game continues. All of this triggers memory, which produces its own stimuli and it isn't long before I start to re-experience other details of that point in time and space, like chowing down on hot dogs and chips in the media hospitality room before the game, or patiently awaiting a sports information department assistant to bring paper copies of the game stats at halftime.
Until this particular Saturday evening, two journalists, actually the same person, were blissfully unaware of such a peculiar connection across the time-space continuum.
One of us still doesn't know.
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