The Boundaries of the Web
A Qualitative Investigation of Young Browsers and
their Online News Rituals
Master Thesis by Sofie Willemsen
Student number: s2582147
Handed in 30/10/2015
Supervisor: Ass. Prof. M.P. Stevenson
Second reader: Lecturer I.M. van den Broek
Master Program in Journalism Studies
Specialization: Writing
ABSTRACT
Through digital media, our access to information is more mobile, increasingly experienced through
social media and characterized by fast clicks. Scholars of journalism have debated whether this has
led to a news-audience that is more flexible, inclusive and critical, or to one that is always
distrac-ted, narcissistic and entertainment-oriented. This thesis contributes to the discussions of the
mean-ing of news in an online environment with an ethnographic, empirical study, that starts from the
concept of ritual media-practices. It poses the question: What is the ritual place of online news in
the lives of young Dutch citizens? Ten young Dutch people were asked to track their online
PREFACE
This thesis is the result of a process that took over a year of reading, researching and writing.
Throughout this year I have learned a lot. Not only about the topic I was writing about, but also
about myself. One of the lessons I have learned is that I don’t have to do everything by myself. I am
lucky to have a lot of wonderful people around me who can guide me in the right direction when
I’m lost, and who can help me through when things get rough. I want to express my thanks to some
of them.
First of all, thank you to Michael Stevenson, for your academic guidance. Our meetings have
al-ways been constructive and inspiring, and the fact that you believed in my ideas gave me the
confi-dence to follow through.
Thank you to Amadou. You have seen most of the rough patches I went through. Thank you for
your encouragement and your love. You have always shown me the way forward by telling me what
I need to hear, even if it’s not what I want to hear.
Also many thanks to all of my friends. Thank you Maud, for reading my work. You always find a
way to inspire me. Thank you to Eline, you always know what to say to make me feel better about
myself. And thank you to Anne, for sharing your experience.
Many thanks go out to my parents, who have always been behind me in every decision. Thank you
for your support and thank you for your patience.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
...
2
Preface
...
3
Introduction
...
6
CHAPTER 1: A Portrait of the Young Browser
...
10
1.1 Living in media ...10
1.1.1 Mobile media ...10
1.1.2 Alone together ...13
1.2 Sharing the Internet ...14
1.2.1 A global village ...14
1.2.2 Notorious narcissists ...17
1.3 Navigating the Web ...19
1.3.1 Distracted clicking ...20
1.3.2 To be entertained ...22
1.4 Questions ...23
CHAPTER 2: A Ritual approach
...
25
2.1 Crossing Boundaries in Media Life ...25
2.1.1 Understanding the Audience ...25
2.1.2 Media Rituals ...28
2.1.3 Everyday boundaries ...31
2.2 Research Design ...32
2.3 Method ...32
2.3.1 Interviews ...33
2.3.2 Participants and location ...36
2.3.3 Analysis ...39
CHAPTER 3: The Rituals of a Life Online
...
41
3.1 Escape and procrastinate ...41
3.1.1 Always online ...41
3.1.2 Checking in and checking out ...43
3.1.3 Digital detox ...46
3.2 Orchestrating Worlds ...48
3.2.1 The personal public ...49
3.2.2 The world ...53
3.2.3 The truth ...56
3.3 Clicking on Intuition ...60
3.3.1 A flow of headlines and images ...61
3.3.2 The chemistry of clicking ...63
3.3.3 Seduction and disappointment ...66
Figure 1: A still from the Youtube-video ‘Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 3, ‘Water Night’ ’1
INTRODUCTION
Eric Whitacre is the main character of an internet-fairytale. Where many failed at bringing people
together online, he managed to create a Virtual Choir. In a TED-talk that has over 3 million views,
the famous classical composer tells us about his adventure. One day, he got an e-mail from a friend
with a link to a Youtube-video. It was a girl was singing one of his songs while looking directly into
the camera. This video inspired him and got him to thinking. What if people from all over the world
would upload their individual parts to the same piece and these would be put together later on? He
quickly put this idea out there and before he knew it, Whitacre had gathered 185 voices from people
coming from 12 different countries. He put them together and the resulting video became a big hit,
with well over four and a half million views. He went on to create virtual choir 2.0, with over 2000
2people from 58 countries singing ‘Sleep’. This was followed by the virtual choir 3 singing ‘Water
3Night’ and choir 4 singing ‘Fly to Paradise’. The last one includes 8,409 videos from 101
countries.
4The Youtube-video of virtual choir 3 singing ‘Water Night’ can be watched here: https://www.y
1
-outube.com/watch?v=V3rRaL-Czxw
The Youtube-video of the choir singing ‘Lux Aurumque’ can be watched here: https://www.y
2
-outube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs
The Youtube-video of the virtual choir 2.0 singing ‘Sleep’ can be found here: https://www.y
3
-outube.com/watch?v=6WhWDCw3Mng
The Youtube-video of virtual choir 4 singing ‘Fly to Paradise’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
4
The videos to these different songs speak to the imagination. They show the countless images of
the individual singers coming together in harmony. In the fourth video, the singers are incorporated
in animated buildings, that together form one big city of music (see the cover of this thesis for a
screenshot of that video). Not only did people enjoy watching these videos, but the participants es
5-pecially enjoyed making them. Whitacre got many comments back saying that people felt
‘connect-ed’ in a way that wasn’t just virtual, they felt like it was real. One of the participants said: "Aside
from the beautiful music, it's great just to know I'm part of a worldwide community of people I
nev-er met before, but who are connected anyway.”
6To many, the story of Whitacre is what the web was created for. To connect people and to make
our lives a better place. Sherry Turkle was once a believer of the possibilities the web gave us to
improve upon our lives, to connect us more. But after she wrote a book about the opportunities of
the web, she had a change of heart and wrote a book on the dangers of the way we actually live with
the internet nowadays. Instead of being part of a network that is a global community, we might
in-stead all be “Alone Together” (Turkle 2011). In her TED-talk, which also has over 3 million views,
the cultural analyst talks about how we have traded real conversation for a more superficial
connec-tion, that actually makes us feel more alone. Looking, again, at the picture on the cover of this the
7-sis, we then see how all of these people are alone in their homes, looking out at each other from a
distance.
Journalists are currently at the middle of these two faces of the internet. On the one hand, the
network offers new ways of telling stories and creating public spaces. On the other hand, online
in-novations are exceptions to a rule of declining audiences to journalistic content. Most journalistic
organizations are in a crisis, as they have yet to find a business model to support most of their work.
They see how a lot of people are increasingly connecting to their social networks for information,
which is attuned to the individual and often highly influenced by commercial interests (c.f. Keen
2015; Pariser 2011). As journalism is an important part of our democratic society, there is a certain
pressure on finding a way on the web. Although we do not really ‘need’ a virtual choir to have a
functioning society, we can say that we do need a functioning public debate for democracy to work.
The Youtube-video of virtual choir 4 singing ‘Fly to Paradise’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
5
v=Y8oDnUga0JU
TED-talk by Eric Whitacre, filmed March 2011: http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_
6
-choir_2_000_voices_strong#t-667295
TED-talk by Sherry Turkle, filmed February 2012: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_
-An important mission for journalists and journalism scholars is then to understand the online
audi-ences online needs for news better. This way, journalists can perhaps tune into the way people live
with digital media. Or, also possible, we can be reassured by the fact that people are doing fine
without journalists online. Either way, we need to not only know what people do on the web, but
also how these practices are meaningful to them. Like the stories of the people in the Virtual Choir
show, if you tap in to the things that make people’s lives meaningful, the web can be a powerful
tool.
Most concern goes out to the younger generation, who are the ‘digital natives’ of our time (Lee
2013, 311; Turkle 2011, xii; Bird 2011, 493; Van der Weel 2011, 210). Some scholars create a rather
pessimistic view of the newest generation: they are distracted, sensation-seeking and self-centered
(c.f. Van der Weel 2011, Aboujaoude 2012). In selection of news, compared to older generations,
young people tend to look more for sensation than information (Lee 2013). And while they are
loo-king for news, they are also doing many other things at the same time, as online information is
con-sumed in a ‘snacking’ and scattered fashion (Van der Weel 2011, Aboujaoude 2012). On the other
hand, as a reaction to the allegations against the young and online, there are also scholars whose
research goes in against the negative image. The hyper-textual browsing and scrolling, for example,
might actually not be so bad (Costeira Meijer 2006). And the sources and amount of news
consu-med, might actually not be that sensational as the younger generation still visit traditional
news-si-tes regularly (API 2015).
This thesis aims to contribute to our knowledge of the place, purpose and interpretation of news
in an evolving web-based environment through an ethnographic study of young browsers. This
master thesis wants to do a small, qualitative study of young people, to learn more about how they
experience and perceive news from the web. To move away from comparisons with more traditional
media, this study seeks the meanings people give to online news themselves in the everyday
con-text. It can thereby understand better what online news consumption means from the ground up.
Building upon existing anthropological media-studies, the concept of ritual is used as a
frame-work to look at young people’s online behavior. As a concept for study, ritual has already been
pro-ven very useful in respect to older media (Rothenbuhler 2006; Larsen and Tofte 2003; Larsen 2000;
Bausinger 1984). It reveals the meaning and purpose that people themselves attach to the media in
their daily lives. Radio can simply serve as a ‚background’ sound (Larsen 2000), and the television
news at eight can be a ritual where people sit to watch together (Madianou 2009). As ritual,
media-ted practices are not necessarily functional but simply meaningful. When something has a function
it means that a certain need is fulfilled by doing something. It is a causal way of looking at what
people do, as they go from a state of less satisfied to more satisfied. Instead, when seen as a ritual
practice, what people do can still be seen as meaningful but not necessarily as fulfilling a clearly
distinguished purpose. Ritual is about the boundaries and categories that guide practices and sees
activities as bringing about a transformation from one state to another. When people do something,
it transforms them, the space they’re in and the people they’re with in multiple ways. By taking on
this perspective, the normative perspective can be thrown off and instead of looking for the reasons
for consuming news we look for the meanings attached to it.
The central research question this research then poses, is the following: What is the ritual place
of online news in the lives of young Dutch citizens? To answer this question, I pose three
sub-ques-tions. How does checking online devices for news transform young browsers’ experience of space?
How do the online platforms through which people gather news transform young browsers’
expe-rience of publics? and How does scrolling online content transform young browsers’ expeexpe-rience of
information? In the first chapter I will elaborate on the relevant theoretical and empirical studies of
CHAPTER 1: A PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG BROWSER
What are we to call this person, this individual who listens and watches and e-mails and texts
and seeks information on-line, and who talks about what has been seen or heard and learned
or understood or who, alternatively, resists or ignores it? An audience member? A spectator?
A user? A communicator? A consumer? A producer? A ‚prosumer’? A citizen? A player? And
how are we to assess such an individual’s power in this mediated world?” (Silverstone 2007,
107).
The way young people interact with online devices, challenges many of our existing ideas on the
way people experience news and what news means to society. To understand this new audience,
scholars have been evaluating and investigating it extensively. These investigations can be
catego-rized into debates concerning three questions: how young people live with digital news in daily life,
how they are part of an online public, and how they interact with and experience online content
(Costera Meijer 2015; Purcell et al. 2010). I will discuss the most important thoughts on these three
questions, showing how the young and online are mobile and flexible, individual and global, and
critical and distracted.
1.1 Living in media
In what we might call the “Golden Age of mass communication” (Peters 2014, 5), news has most
commonly been associated with the home environment. Newspapers, radio and television play
im-portant roles in our homely routines. They can even be seen as “a totemic object of enormous
sym-bolic importance in the household” (Morley 2003, 444). But in the online age, people are
increas-ingly taking devices with them everywhere. Theory shows that, on the one hand, this takes the
me-dia and news out of the places we call home. But on the other hand, turning faces to a screen and
check it for something new make any place feel like home. News, then, also becomes to mean
something different as we take it with us everywhere. But wherever we go, we can find a home in
our devices.
Media affect the spaces we are in. This is not only the case when we interact with them, but their
mere presence is already meaningful. Pink and Leder Mackley (2013) investigated the place of
elec-tronic media-devices in people’s lives by simply questioning the practice of turning them on and
off. The focus of the study was on „how, through mundane and not usually spoken about routines of
everyday living, media are engaged for affective and embodied ways of making the home ‚feel
right’” (Pink and Leder Mackely 2013, 678). The habitual routines for turning on and off devices
revealed „the ongoingness of the media-saturated home” (ibid., 688) in which the mere fact of
de-vices being turned on created a certain ‚feel’ with people concerning the place they were in. In such
a way we „make and experience place with media technologies by engaging their capacities to be
on/off and as such helping create environments that ‚feel right’ in creative, diverse and innovative
ways” (ibid., 689).
It is then not only about the spaces in which we use them, but also about the time. We can look at
interaction with media as creating spaces of ‘time in’ and ‘time out’ (Steeg Larsen 2000, 264). The
‘time out’ is when reality is reflected on and the ‘time in’ is when people are somehow integrated in
meaningful social relationships (Jensen 1995 in Steeg Larsen 2000, 264). Steeg Larsen, in his
dis-cussion on the radio as ritual, found that as a background sound the radio is part of the ‘time in’ and
not so much part of the ‘time out’.
The way we deal with online media, shapes our contextual experiences of news quite differently
than radio and television. Where the latter were often confined to particular times and places, the
former are mobile (Deuze 2011, 137). As we carry devices around, they are no longer an intricate
part of the physical home environment of the house. Digital devices in the form of computers,
tablets and phones accompany individual people throughout the day. People are now constantly
multi-tasking on these online devices, which have become a part of almost every aspect of their
lives (Deuze 2011, 137). This means a blurring of the use of devices at home, at work and on the
way (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2015, 670).
It seems that, as online media are mobile, they are no longer shaping a set place and time in our
home, but they are actually shaping to our individual flexibility (Morley 2003, 446). As Morley
(2003) described it, we may call it the “de-domestication of the media” and the “radical dislocation
of domesticity” itself. As we no longer confine media consumption to a physical home, it is not only
that we take the device out of our home but we also take the feeling of home attached to the device
with us everywhere (Morley 2003, 450). What then has been said to become the ‘locality’ instead,
is no longer so much a place, but it is ourselves:
it becomes, in effect, the person’s virtual address, while their land line becomes a merely
se-condary communication facility (and one of seeming irrelevance to many young people).
(Morley 2003, 445)
So where we were once shaping our homes through media, having them as part of our homely
ac-tivities such as breakfast and evening relaxation, we seem to be increasingly at home in our mobile
media. We should not only see it as a change in the places in which we ‘use’ media, but these media
also change our notion of being at home in any space.
Space carries a different meaning as we carry digital media around. Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000)
Liquid Modernity describes a general ‘fluidity’ in current times, of which our liquid locality forms
just a part: “fluidity is (now) the principal source of strength and invincibility . . . it is now the
smaller, the lighter, the more portable that signifies improvement and “progress” (Bauman 2000,
13-14 in Morley 2003, 446). Being mobile and flexible is what this time and age seems to hold in
high esteem. It is a most important quality to actually not be confined to one place and space. The
digital device makes all of this possible. As we carry devices with us everywhere and use them for
everything, they no longer form a separate or particular part of our lives (Purcell et al. 2010, 30).
Our relationship to news has evolved as well to become more fluid and flexible. Where the
phys-ical context of the television- and the radio-news depended on the time of ‘broadcast’, the web
al-lows people to go look for the newest content whenever and wherever they want (Westlund 2013;
Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelinck 2015). They do not need to be at a certain place and time to
be able to ‘receive’ news. News is increasingly something that is ‘checked’ multiple times a day
and at different places. In fact, news seems to have become part of a general ““checking cycle,”
which involves checking the latest in terms of news, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder,
Grindr, and so on, all in one quick session” at any time or place (Costera Meijer and Groot
Ko-rmelink 2015, 670).
1.1.2 ALONE TOGETHER
Going back to the „media-saturated home” (Pink and Leder Mackely, 688), part of the time we use
media in our house, we are listening, reading or watching news in a family-setting. Usually being
part of set times and places, these news-rituals also form part of our experience of the places we are
in together with the people that are in them. An ethnographic study of Larsen (2000) showed how a
radio broadcast in the morning was a crucial part of a breakfast ritual of a family. The news is ‚new’
every day, but the format and the context in the way it was brought remains the same. In its
‚every-dayness’, the symbolic meanings of the radio ritual in the morning could be seen as an important
part of a daily and fixed ritual that remained the same over time. In a similar light, the television is
part of our living rooms, where it generally takes on a more central space compared to the radio. It
is a visual medium, and therefore also a visible object (Morley 1995 quoted in Morley 2003). The
television „establishes a collective audiovisual space” for the people living in the home (Larsen and
Tufte 2003, 101). Because people gather around it in their living-rooms, the medium is something
that is associated with the physical and social experience of home, while at the same time
connect-ing it to the public world (Madianou 2009, 330).
In the digital environment, the way news-consumption is embedded into the spaces we are in is
less social. Where news used to be something shared with others, on digital devices it is
increasing-ly consumed ‘solo’. It has been said that the mobile phone is creating more individual spaces: “the
mobile phone is perhaps the privatizing (or individualizing) technology of our age, par
excellence” (Morley 2003, 451). To the younger generation, news is now part of this private bubble
in digital devices. Instead of being audiences to media, our present situation could perhaps be better
described as living in media (Deuze 2012, x).
The mobile music-player was one of the first devices that offered us the possibility of creating
private spaces, although these were private spaces of listening, within public places (Bull 2005).
Listening to their personally preferred music, people create a kind of cocoon for themselves and
create a feeling of distance from whatever is going on in public spaces. They can thereby exert
some kind of control over their own private experience within this public place (Bull 2005). It was
here that we first of all created a kind of ‘home’ in places that were previously considered far from
it.
them. The online connection has been said to be more superficial. We might all be ‚Alone Together’
in these spaces in which everyone seems absent and retreated into their own bubble (Turkle 2011).
In the mobile online context, the way news shapes the space we are in is thus quite different. It is
not the background sound to a breakfast routine, or a common visual device we turn to with
fami-lies. Although one could say this is merely the ‘context’ of news consumption and the physical
di-mension of the news experience is only a small part of it, it should also not be underestimated.
1.2 Sharing the Internet
News is considered as an important institution in the democratic system (Dahlgren 2013). Through
news, people can then be seen as a political ‘public’ that is not so much a group of people that
inter-acts with each other directly, but it is a group of people that interinter-acts with the same news-messages
and thereby establish a sense of (political) community (Couldry, Linvingstone and Markham 2007,
1-2):
[M]ost people share an orientation to a public world where matters of common concern are, or
at least should be, addressed (we call this orientation ‘public connection’). Second, this public
connection is focussed principally on mediated versions of that public world (so that ‘public
connection’ is principally sustained by a convergence in what media people consume, in other
words, by shared or overlapping shared media consumption)” (Couldry, Linvingstone and
Markham 2007, 1-2).
As people are in contact with mediated messages, they actually create a kind of shared space with
others who also interact with these same messages (Silverstone 2007, 30-31). How such a public is
created on the web, has given rise to several discussions. The hierarchical role of the journalist in
the national democracy is lost and taken over by social, commercial and global influences.
1.2.1 A GLOBAL VILLAGE
individ-ual and his or her immediate social surrounding with an idea of a world beyond that immediate
sur-rounding: “switching on the radio is to enter into a shared world” (Larsen 2000, 271).
In this story, what is of public concern within this shared world, is largely decided by the
journal-ists who created the radio-broadcast. With these older media, journalistic organizations held a
cer-tain power over what stories were told and how. They were seen as the ‘agenda-setters’. People
par-ticipated in this democracy via media (Dahlgren 2013), in which journalists served as the mediators.
The public was then shared with everyone who listened to this broadcast. The overlap in media
con-sumption that has long been most obvious through radio, television and newspaper, is that of people
who share a nation (c.f. Anderson 1991, 36). Looking at media consumption in general, but also at
news in particular, it is often distributed in a national context. This means that the stories are put in
a national language and created for a national audience, by which a sense of community is
estab-lished by all people who share the nation. Although the people of a nation could never all meet each
other, they do feel connected in a way that they actually identify themselves with this community
(Anderson 1991).
Re-affirming, among other things, this shared idea of the nation, journalists and journalistic
or-ganizations can be seen as having a certain amount of power. This power can be considered a
‘sym-bolic power’. Couldry (2003) discusses the concept of sym‘sym-bolic power in his book on ‘media
ritu-als’, which will be elaborated upon more in the third chapter of this thesis. Here I want to present
his ideas on power. Central here is that, through media rituals, people make natural the idea that our
society has a centre, in which the media plays a large part. Media practices are dispersed and
dis-placed activities, therefore the way to see them is as existing in a ‘ritual space’ (Couldry 2003,
chapter 3). The ritual space of media is characterized by one main inequality. This is the fact that
the media are those with the main power to ‘name’ or to ‘describe’. Media generally define the
frames and the categories through which people communicate. This is a symbolic power,
accompa-nied by a symbolic violence, which means that it is a power without formal compulsion or formal
violence. But the fact that it is symbolic doesn’t make it less influential than other power-hierarchies
such as the political or the economic power structures. Symbolic power is embedded deeply into
our society for it affects not only “what we do but also our ability to describe the social
itself” (ibid., 39).
The web disruptively changes the dynamics of the public debate and the sense of being part of a
public.
and affordable access, does fundamentally change the character of communication. (Castells
2010, 356)
On the web, people can actually create and interact more through content actively. They can
partici-pate in media (Dahlgren 2013). Online, people can acces information individually and have more
freedom to choose from a large body of information that is not limited to a journalist’s broadcast at
a certain timeframe. It might be considered as “the ultimate archive, a public library of (almost)
everything” (Deuze 2012, XV). The public that is created through the web, is then very different
compared to older media.
Online, people can move beyond national channels of communication. The world wide web
ar-guably plays a large role in the wider process of increased global connection (Tomlinson 2001,
270). The political and cultural experience of ‘the nation’ has been said to be less and less important
in an increasingly global world (c.f. Berglez 2008). A 24-year old in a study of Couldry, Livingstone
and Markham (2007) was said to experience public connection „globally, with the media playing an
essential role in making us transcend our local, personal spheres so as to recognize the common,
emotional bonds that unite humanity” (Couldry, Livingstone and Markham 2007, 10).
The web might lead us closer to a ‘global journalism’:
If globalization is defined by ongoing relations between regions and peoples, generated by
capi-tal, trade, human mobility and technology, then global journalism ought to be the kind of
journa-listic practice which: “makes it into an everyday routine to investigate how people and their
ac-tions, practices, problems, life conditions etc. in different parts of the world are
interrelated” (Berglez 2008, 846-7).
Global journalism is seen to move beyond a conceptualization of the world within national
contai-ners, going outside the traditional categorization of domestic and foreign. Journalism with a global
outlook seeks to explain and understand economic, political and cultural problems and processes
across the globe by looking at the way different parts of the world are interrelated, not necessarily
taking the nation-state as point of departure from which to understand social reality (Berglez 2008,
847). A global outlook thus emphasizes connection over division of social reality, complicating the
relationship between a separated part and the imagined totality (Berglez 2008, 849).
This ideal of global journalism, however, is still an ideal. The nation is a dominant and
well-ma-nifested idea in peoples’ minds, that is not easily challenged (Berglez 2008; Conboy 2008;
Ge-schiere 2009). Although the web offers the possibility for information to easily travel across
bor-ders, it doesn’t mean it necessarily does so:
na-tional phenomenon, dominated by domestic news consumption and use of information.
Thereby the Web becomes yet another platform for the reproduction of the traditional outlook
on society in which the surrounding world is viewed as „foreign places”. (Berglez 2013, 105).
Although the web is in fact a global channel, it doesn’t mean that the messages that are spread on it
are necessarily one of a global outlook and people necessarily experience it as a global shared
space.
According to Bird (2003; 2010), indeed everything we want to know about anything seems to be
available online, but there is only so much a person can consume (Bird 2003). Bird states: „We may
be able to make creative, individual meanings from this torrent of messages and images, but we can
still only work with what we’re given” (Bird 2003, 3). When it comes to news, Bird (2010)
empha-sizes that although a very wide spectrum of information is available on what happens all over the
world, people might not come across it in their daily experience:
Most of us, for instance, are very aware that the story of the Iraq war is deeply contested. We
can scour the internet and find accounts of events that differ radically. If we have time (a lot
of it!) we might sit down, sift through it all, and reach some kind of conclusion about the
“truth”. Most people in most societies don’t have the time or the resources to do that – they
have little choice but to engage with the stories that predominate in their daily experiences
(Bird 2010, 10)
Looking at the daily experiences of people on the web, there are also criticisms that point in the
op-posite direction of open, global publics. Instead of people widening their world on the web, they
might be closing them in.
1.2.2 NOTORIOUS NARCISSISTS
Social media are the fastest growing area of media exposure (Potter 2014, 5). Facebook, the main
network-site, for example currently has 400 million members (Keen 2015, 65). On these platforms,
people - especially young people - share content to small or large networks of people (e.a.
Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2010; Messing and Weestwood 2012). We might say that, as we
can-not deal with the large amount of mediated information ourselves, “the only way we can make
sense of ourselves and each other in media is by carefully, and continuously, checking each other
out” (Deuze 2012, XV). The increased use of social media seems to replace the traditional
(hierar-chical) agenda-setting function of the journalist towards the social network. Messing and Westwood
(2012) suggest that there is
agenda-setting power is vested in the wisdom of crowds or the individual (Messing and
Westwood 2012, 17)
Where the journalist used to be the one who got to say what is ‘new’, it is now no longer the case as
people rely on themselves and each other.
As journalistic outlets are losing their audiences to these online spaces, it might be that people
only gather information within small ‘filter-bubbles’ (Pariser 2011). As information on social media
is often shared with like-minded people, we might in fact not get in contact with a diversity of
in-formation the internet has to offer (Bozdag and Van den Hoven 2014). The people we include in our
Facebook- and Twitter-feeds are usually those with similar viewpoints. The information young
people then share with each other, is the kind that resonates with the viewpoints and standpoints
they already have. Furthermore, beyond the people we interact with, the algorithms these platforms
use also function in a way that we increasingly come into contact with the kinds of information
people have already somehow showed to be interested in (Pariser 2011; Bozdag and van den Hoven
2014). From this perspective, the web is only accessed through a small and familiar funnel of
already established interests and viewpoints.
We rely less on journalists to get information, but it’s also been said that people increasingly
dis-trusted journalists in their claims to truth (Aboujaoude 2012; Van Zoonen 2012, 57). The web erases
previous information privileges of institutions, bringing about a “dissolution of offline hierarchical
relationships when it comes to information” (Abouajaoude 2012, 198). People have therefore
actu-ally become more critical towards these institutionalized types of knowledge. There is no longer an
institution that tells us what is true, as we all have access to an endless amount of information about
the world. Instead, we deem ourselves more competent as we have more access to information as
individuals. Through the web we might consider ourselves to all be able to be „equally informed
and qualified” (Abouajaoude 2012, 199).
Andrew Keen, in his book ‘The Internet is not the Answer’ , tries to warn people about
overesti-mating individual freedom on the web and underestioveresti-mating another powerful factor in deciding our
web-experiences. Facebook and Google are commercial companies with commercial interests. They
make revenues from these platforms and therefore the input of the advertising industry is also a big
factor in deciding what (kind of) content people come into contact with. According to Keen, it is
impossible to know how these players actually influence our virtual streams of content (Keen
2015). Facebook, for example, does not publish its algorithm that defines the Facebook-timeline.
The ‘public’ of the web is thus not only shaped by our social connections and our personal interests,
but also by the interests of commercial companies.
To the gain of these commercial players, people are actually sharing themselves on the web.
They are ‘selfie centric’. Keen questions whether the web is a place for communicating at all:
Most Web communication these days actually takes place inside that intimate hundred-millimeter
radius between our faces and our mobile devices. The real myth is that we are communicating at
all. The truth, of course, is that we are mostly just talking to ourselves on these supposedly
“so-cial” networks. (Keen 2015, 109).
The way we use our mobile devices, Keen seems to argue, is mostly in a way to promote (a version
of) ourselves. The medium that was supposed to bring us into a ‘global village’ actually brought the
most narcissistic qualities in us to the fore. According to him, however, this is not so much to blame
on the ‘audience’, but on the lucky few who profit from this system. The people who own the few
companies that rule the web, again, companies like Google and Facebook.
1.3 Navigating the Web
The web, being the endless archive of information that it is, offers an endless amount of
possibili-ties to people to inform themselves. However, how the younger generation makes use of these
pos-sibilities is often discussed critically. Bauman explains that freedom to go through an endless
amount of content is not necessarily experienced as freedom:
How young people navigate on the web, first of all seems to be questioned for whether they actually
pay attention to anything at all, and, second, if they do whether the things they pay attention to are
of any value.
1.3.1 DISTRACTED CLICKING
The amount of media messages people are confronted with on a daily basis, has increased rapidly
over the years (Potter 2014, 5). We have come to a point that we are almost constantly exposed to
some form of content, whether music, a text or a video, everywhere we go. All these messages
means that people cannot pay attention to all of them. They have to constantly make way through
the large amount of information everywhere they go, by making choices and taking decisions on
what to read and what not to read, what to watch and what not to watch. According to Potter in his
book Media Literacy, people cope by going into an “automatic routine”. These are “sequences of
behaviors or thoughts that we learn from experience and then apply again and again with little
ef-fort” (Potter 2014, 8). In this way, we do not have to pay attention to everything around us. Potter
compares it to a code for doing something that we can reload and reload as many times as we want,
for example for brushing our teeth and tying our shoes. Such a code is also used to deal with our
mediated environment. We put our minds to an ‘automatic pilot’ in which we no longer experience
all the media-messages, but instead filter out some of them.
Potter (2014) describes how people nowadays deal with this media saturated environment in
general, and the web in particular. The internet first of all cannot be conceived by the information it
supplies. The webpages that Google has indexed, for example, amounts up to 13.4 billion. This,
however, has been claimed to only be 1% of the total amount of pages (Potter 2014, 4). The
infor-mation that (young) people are confronted with is then way more than they could ever consume.
When going online, people can first of all make selections by purposefully going on a search
(Pot-ter, 2014, 6-7). Search engines such as Google allow us to access information by clearly stating a
topic, question or phrase. Besides those searches, however, people also enter the web’s information
through automatic routines. Potter states that, although automatic processing is necessary for us to
be able to deal with the huge amount of mediated messages, it can also be considered a bit
danger-ous.
sup-port that, as we increase the amount of messages, there is a decrease in attention that is paid to them
(see for example Aboujaoude 2012; Van der Weel 2011). According to Van der Weel (2011, 169),
who studied the changes in our textual minds as we go online, people experience high competition
between different sorts of content in the digital space of the internet. They can consume text, games,
video and music, and do consume all of it. As a result, especially young people have been proven to
click away from text to text very quickly (Van der Weel 2011, 168-169). This fast clicking actually
results in learning less (Potter 2014, 9; Aboujaoude 2012). Psychologist Aboujaoude (2012) wrote
very critically about the way (young) people deal with information on the web. He came to the
con-clusion that perhaps online nothing is really read at all. The speed and fractured nature of the web
makes people evade the responsibility of really reading anything:
Regardless of age group or background, and across a host of information goals, people seem
to be clicking and flicking their way through the virtual stacks of cyberspace, searching
hori-zontally rather than vertically, and spending more time circuitously looking for answers than
actually reading them. (..) This reading method, which propels the reader from search to
search until something, related or unrelated, catches the attention, does not constitute true
reading. It constitutes evasion of reading. (Abouajaoude 2012, 191)
The most negative image of the young and online is thus that they for one, don’t really read
any-thing.
One of the main terms Costeira Meijer (2006) uses to describe the way her respondents behave
with media, is that of ‚Zapping’ or ‘snack news’. She argues that „zapping can create some sort of
hyperconsciousness of all that is broadcasted at a given moment; it renders the brain
hyperactive” (Costera Meijer 2006, 9). Seeing the switching between content as distraction is
actu-ally a misinterpretation of young people’s mediated practices:
From the perspective of older people zapping is superficial, but from the angle of youngsters
it is merely another way of collecting information, which is rather geared to broad and
contex-tual insight than to in-depth knowledge. Young viewers do not just zap because they are bored
with what they see. Zapping is also a way of checking whether you missed something
impor-tant, of finding out if perhaps there is more to be gained from viewing. They do not so much
cut themselves off, but they continuously gather bits and pieces of information from a large
variety of media. Rather than reflecting zero brain activity, zapping requires a concentrated
effort. (Costera Meijer 2006, 15)
multi-1.3.2 TO BE ENTERTAINED
If young people eventually do take their time to take in an article, video or other type of
informa-tion, they seem to focus on the entertainment-oriented content. In the automatic state of mind,
Pot-ter says we can “make poor exposure decisions” (potPot-ter 2014, 9). We seem, for example, not so
good at consciously choosing information that we actually want and need. Our ‘code’ is
pro-grammed by many different things, including our families and educations that mean well for us. But
a large part of our codes are also decided by interests that are against our own, especially the
com-mercial one. We have often internalized comcom-mercial messages that try to influence us in our
deci-sions by convincing us that things they want you to want will make us happy. These play a large
role in how we make way through content without us knowing it (Potter 2014, 10).
Lee (2013) recently looked at American news consumption and found that
entertainment-orient-ed content was especially lookentertainment-orient-ed after by young people. She did a quantitative survey departing
from a ‘uses and gratifications’ perspective. She surveyed American citizens on whether they were
driven by either information-, entertainment-, opinion- or social motivates in their consumption of
30 different news-sources (Lee 2013, 307-311). From her quantitative data we can see trends in
news consumption according to age or background - for example seeing that younger people are
more interested in entertainment (Lee 2013).
The worry of young people being too much focussed on commercial messages and
entertain-ment, however, is far from new. Surrounding young people and television news, a similar debate
took and still takes place. The discussion was whether young people watched enough news when
they ‘zapped’ through channels. As scholars were discussing whether young people’s behaviour
was either good or bad, Costera Meijer (2006) tried to move past the debate: “In order to explain
and move beyond these contradictory results we decided to adopt a more comprehensive approach.
Our major objective was to establish how today’s young individuals in the Netherlands actually
ex-perience and reflect on television news” (Costera Meijer 2006, 4). Coster Meijer found that young
people generally end up consuming more sensational and entertaining content even if this is not
what they themselves think is good. Costera Meijer (2006, 13) calls this the ‚double viewing
para-dox’:
Although they find news important, the general tendency of youngsters is to still go for the easy and
exciting content. Their take on information is not only on its informative content but also on the
communicative form. How is it communicated over what it is saying. So both the form and the
con-tent of the information has to be “new, fun, exciting, odd or harsh; a program has to have some
in-gredient that impresses, surprises, amazes or shocks them” (Costera Meijer 2006, 8).
A recent study from the American Press Institute opposed the general tendency of scholars to
perceive online browsing as negative. They conducted an extensive study on ‘millenials’ and
con-cluded to be positive about the way young people consume news online. In the introduction they
start of by saying that it is a “study that looks closely at how people learn about the world on these
different devices and platforms finds that this newest generation of American adults is anything but
“newsless, passive, or civically uninterested” (API 2015). Asking young people about their news
habits, showed that they actually did consume quite a lot of news.
After her study of the television audience, Costera Meijer recently did a longitudinal study of
news practices on the web (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2015). Again, this study tries to
move past normative judgement of young people and news but rather aims at understanding it
bet-ter. They found that the way in which young people interact with news is carried out through a new
and evolving set of practices: “the digitalization of journalism has deepened and increased the
op-portunities and options for the reading, watching, viewing, listening, checking, snacking,
monitor-ing, scannmonitor-ing, searching and clicking of news” (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2015, 675).
According to this study, these 16(!) different practices make up what people do online.
1.4 Questions
Hanzitsch 2009, 8). This thesis wants to contribute to our understanding of the young browser and
his or her experience of news.
First of all, the news-ritual can be seen to transform people’s experience and sense of the
physi-cal space they are in. News is an important part of the physiphysi-cal lives that people lead and the places
that they go to. In the online lives of young people, we know that they take online devices with
them as they go and check news on them as part of a more broad checking routine. As news is
checked, monitored and read everywhere, this defines the meaning and experience they have of the
practice of news consumption. But, beyond that, it changes the experience they have of space. To
find out what the impact of online news consumption is in the daily lives of these people, I ask the
question: How does checking online devices for news transform young browsers’ experiences of
space?
Second, through news people experience a sense of being part of something bigger. Through
on-line media, this is increasingly something that is felt through social media instead of being decided
by journalists. To contribute to discussions on how this shift has resulted in increasingly global and
at the same time individual experiences of the world, I ask the question:
How do the online
plat-forms they use transform young browsers’ experience of a public?
Online, young people increasingly experience content through fast clicks. They have been
ac-cused of going through information too quickly and without taking responsibility. At the same time,
they might be able to handle more information creatively and simultaneously. We might consider
them critical readers as they don’t believe everything they’re told, but they might also be
self-cen-tered and overly arrogant. To contribute to these discussions, I ask the third question: How does
scrolling online content transform young browsers’ experience of information?
Together, these questions can answer my main question: (In what way) do young Dutch people
experience online news-practices as a meaningful ritual? What I mean by ritual and how this
CHAPTER 2: A RITUAL APPROACH
To improve our awareness, attention, and understanding of what the experiences of journal-ism will be in the future, we must certainly begin to speak with audiences, as opposed to just about them. (Peters 2012, 704)
