Investigating the behavior of imbalanced news consumption on mobile devices

Abstract

News audiences have less varied information than in the past due to the improved performance of personalized filters The interaction between personalized filters and user behavior may form a personal “filter bubble ” The best way to obstruct this “filter bubble” is to prevent imbalanced consumption of information This research raises two research questions concerning the influence methods of provision and presentation styles on news reading behavior The first question is how do personalized filters lead to imbalanced consumption? The second question is what style of news presentation is attractive to the news audience? Three research objectives are achieved by answering the two research questions: 1 To investigate the influence of personalized filters on reading behavior 2 To observe the influence of presentation styles on news selection 3 To make design suggestions for a mobile news app There are two hypotheses are proposed base on research questions and literature review Hypothesis 1: If a mobile news app provides more news articles for a given news category users will consume more news articles in that news category Hypothesis 2: News presented in multimedia styles will attract consumption This research conducted a field experiment to verify the hypotheses There is a mobile news app is implemented as the instrument of the experiment The mobile news app can collect instant news from the Internet and it displays news articles in accordance with the preferences of the participants and the phases of the experiment The user interface is simple and easy to use In the meantime it records the users’ reading behavior The mobile news app is implemented by the technology of website’s implementation The framework of development includes an online database The experiment of this research recruits participants who have the habit of consuming news on mobile device This experiment conducts in two phases: The first phase is aimed at an understanding of the preference and reading behavior of the participants The preference data becomes the reference of the adjustment in phase two At the end the research compares the changes of individual participant’s reading behavior between the two phases The results of the experiment did not fully support the hypotheses There are two main findings of this research First one is that the different audience has different reactions to personalized filters Second is that multimedia is not the main factor of news consumption The knowledge of design and implementation of the mobile news app instrument of this experiment contributes to this research field for further research Finally this research gives two design suggestions for mobile news app: 1 Personalized filters should provide different strengths of filtering according to the level of imbalance 2 Different types of news audiences are suited to different kind of personalized filters

Date of Award	2016 Sept 1
Original language	English
Supervisor	Sheng-Fen Chien (Supervisor)