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32 - Opinion Formation and Polarisation in the News Feed Era

Effects from Digital, Social, and Mobile Media

from Part III - Contemporary Challenges to Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

By
Johanna Dunaway  and
Jaime Settle
Edited by
Danny Osborne  and
Chris G. Sibley
Danny Osborne
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
Chris G. Sibley
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
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Summary

Today’s information environment is drastically different from the heyday of print and broadcast, but these changes exceed the scope of researchers’ agendas. More is known now than when these technologies were in their infancy, yet efforts to understand the implications of changing communication technology for media effects have produced mixed findings, limiting progress towards cohesive and generalisable theoretical explanations. A literature review suggests one reason for this is that media effects scholarship has often neglected insights from political psychology and information processing, contributing to a lack of theoretical coherence across these bodies of work. Though research thoroughly examines directional motivations dictating media choice and exposure, it does not equally consider other cognitive biases driving choice, exposure, and processing, which can offset effects from the structural aspects of digital media. Given ample evidence that communication technology influences information processing, any viable, contemporary explanation of media effects must reconcile with these literatures.

Keywords

Digital mediaInformation processingMedia effectsOpinion formationPolarisation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology , pp. 508 - 525
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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