Ubiquitous News Experienced Alone: Interviews with Americans and their Devices

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Scholars, journalists, and other commentators argue that many parts of the world, including the US, are suffering a social-epistemological crisis, sometimes called "post-truth", and that this crisis is related to the fragmentation of newsmedia. The conventional media effects research explanation for this relationship between news and ``post-truth'' is framed in terms of messages and information---especially misinformation---as the mechanism by which media effect change. Analysing the results of a large (n = 164) interview study on mobile and other digital news audiencehood, this article presents an alternative, complementary explanation focused on ritual functions of communication. The primary method of affinity analysis of interview data identified a number of recurring themes: people's preferences, methods, and patterns of news consumption exhibit wild diversity beyond easy summary, but they share the experience of news as nearly ubiquitous, and often as excessive and therefore in need of some management. Strategies for managing news broadly fell into categories of news avoidance and active research. Perhaps the most consistent observation across participants' accounts, however, is a conspicuous absence of other people, with news managed and confronted alone. Those findings are interpreted through James Carey's ritual theory of communication, which argues that meaning emerges not only through transmission of messages and information, but also through people's shared experiences of participating in the ritual processes of communication. This work makes a parallel argument that media fragmentation has been implicated in social-epistemological breakdown not only through the mechanism of messages and (mis)information, but also through the transformation and, in certain cases, loss of shared news rituals ``whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed'' (p.19 [23]). The combination of large-scale interview research with media ritual analysis led to these insights about the cultural relevance and collective implications of people's experiences of ubiquitous news and the avoidance thereof.