Volume 44, Issue 2

Online communication is often seen to promote audience fragmentation because it facilitates selective exposure and therefore is likely to divide audiences into sub-publics that hardly share common issues with other sub-publics. This study takes a micro-perspective on fragmentation by focusing on issue diversity in media items users have encountered in a particular week. Diversity was assessed via content analyses based on online diaries of 645 participants who recorded their media use concerning the German debates on climate change and federal elections. Findings show lower degrees of diversity for users of non-journalistic online media than for users of journalistic mass media.

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) not only enable users to read or create content about brands, but also to easily pass along this content using information diffusion mechanisms such as retweeting or sharing. While these capabilities can be optimal for viral marketing, little is known, however, about how reading brand messages passed along by SNS contacts influences online brand communication outcomes. Results of a survey with active SNS users indicate that (1) message evaluation, (2) the relationship with the sender, and (3) the receiver’s opinion leadership and opinion-seeking levels influence not only the receiver’s intention to pass along the message further, but also his or her attitude towards the brand. The implications of these findings are discussed, including how these capabilities brought on by SNSs change the brand-consumer relationship online.

The antecedents of immigration attitudes have been extensively examined in academic research, in particular, with respect to media use and personal contact with immigrants. Research on the role of interpersonal discussions about the issue of immigration has been scarce, however. Results from a two-wave panel survey show that individuals holding unfavorable attitudes towards immigration engaged more often in interpersonal communication about immigration, which colored the overall effect of engaging in such discussions. The implications of these results are discussed in the concluding section.

The following paper addresses the experience of reality in video-calls. To this extent, it first draws from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reflections that connect the question of reality with that of interaction and that of intersubjective communication. These reflections set the larger theoretical framework for sketching out ten theses with regard to the specific case of video-calls. To this extent it addresses issues like the public-private divide, the specific image-form of contemporary video-calls, the mutual intersubjective relations they involve, as well as their specific spatiality and temporality.

The aim of this study is to analyze the reasons behind users’ selection of news results on the news aggregator website, Google News, and the role that news factors play in this selection. We assume that user’s cognitive elaboration of users influences their news selection. In this study, a multi-method approach is used to obtain a complete picture of the users’ news selection reasoning: an open survey, a closed survey, and a content analysis of screen recording data. The results were determined from online news selection of 90 news results from 47 users on Google News. Different news values could be identified as relevant for selection: time-referenced news factors and news factors of social significance were shown to be more important than the news factors of deviance. News cues (presence of a picture, position of a news result, source) were identified as selection reasons regardless of the level of cognitive elaboration during the online browsing process.