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Sílvia Majó-Vázquez Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC)
@silviamajo
Ana S. Cardenal, PhD Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC)
@ana_cardenal
A Network Analysis of the Online Audience Behavior:
Towards a Better Comprehension of the
Public Agenda
Broader ongoing project jointly with Professor S. González-Bailón, PhD, Annenberg UPenn. Mapping the two levels of the online public sphere: The online news media network The online audience network Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref: CSO2013-4782-P) More information www.opinionet.net
The Research Project
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
#1 Does the web guarantee a digital public sphere? #1.1 Which are the patterns of online audience behaviour?
#1.2 Hubs of public attention are the necessary conditions for an online public agenda. Can we find high levels of audience overlapping in the online sphere?
#1.3 To what extend do people enjoy shared informational
experiences in the Internet?
The Research Question
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
Political information is a vehicle for engagement in the democratic process (Gutmann & Thompson, 2009; Sunstein, 2009)
Democracy depends extensively on an informed citizenry about the
most important problems in their societies (Converse, 1964; Habermas, 1994; Katz, 1996; Rawls, 2009)
Shared informational experiences are necessary for the public debate in a deliberative democracy
Justification of the interest
Decentralized and high-choice media environment on the web has fostered a theoretically ambiguous debate
Earliest approaches contended that the web would democratize the
public sphere (Benkler, 2006; Negroponte, 1995; Rheingold, 1994)
The Internet fosters the end of the mass audiences (Castells, 2009;
Napoli, 2011) and the unlimited audience fragmentation (Baum & Groeling, 2008; Baum, 2012; Sunstein, 2009; Turow, 1998)
Justification of the interest
In place of a collective shared public agenda, fragmented and competing media agendas would have emerged (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2002; Shaw & Hamm, 1997; Tewksbury, 2005)
The sheer number of news sources available on the web does not
determine the extend of the audience fragmentation (Ksiazek, 2011)
Having more media outlets to get information does not imply that
people might not have a common public agenda
Justification of the interest
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
Networks are at the heart of the online communication structure
Network Science to map network of audience behavior and identify patterns of audience overlapping
Aggregated data from online browsing tracking behavior
Data and Methods
ComScore representative panel of 30,000 individuals in Spain
First time that this data is used for the study of modes of exposure to political information in Spain
Collected in December 2014
Data and Methods
Audience data for 165 Spanish news outlets
New media and traditional media
We measure audience overlapping for each pair of nodes
Data and Methods
Identify statistical significant ties (levels of audience overlapping) by building on the previous work by Ronen et. Al., (2014)
A link is defined within a pair of nodes when the probability that audience from outlet i also attend outlet j is higher than we would expect based on the overall reach of the outlet alone
2,510 total number of ties among 105 nodes
Our network is directed and weighted
Data and Methods
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
To assess the fragmentation of the online audience network we computed the centralization degree (Freeman, 1979) à 0.22
The network is not totally decentralized (0) thus some nodes still concentrate high levels of audience overlapping
The bigger the node the higher the audience overlapping it receives
The larger levels of audience overlapping flow towards a small group of nodes
Results
To identify groups of nodes that share a similar structure we run a structural equivalence analysis (Burt, 1987)
The Dendrogram depicts similarities in the network of audience overlapping
The majority of the news outlets, at the centre of the figure, are pretty similar
Nodes at the left and right extremes are the same media outlets with higher levels of audience overlapping in the visualization
Results
Audience concentration still remains in the web (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010; González-Bailón, 2009; Webster & Ksiazek, 2012)
Traditional media driving the public agenda offline are still at the core
of the online audience flow
The structure of audience overlapping brings evidence that the web
can provide people with similar bits of information
A significant share of citizens gets news from multiple online media outlets
Results
1) The Research Question
2) Justification of Interest
3) Data and Methods
4) Results
5) Discussion and future research
The extend to what people are aware of the information provided by hubs of audience is not proved by this network analysis
The boundary specifications of our network might influence the results
Further research across time and platforms to obtain comparative results is necessary
We cannot generalize to the entire population in the web. Our study is focus on people politically interested which seek for online news
The end of information scarcity does not equate to the ceasing of the online public sphere
Discussion and future research
Sílvia Majó-Vázquez Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC)
@silviamajo
Ana S. Cardenal, PhD Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC)
@ana_cardenal
Thank you!
Questions and feedback greatly appreciated