The distraction effect. Political and entertainment-oriented content on social media, political participation, interest, and knowledge
- Autor(en)
- Jörg Matthes, Raffael Heiss, Hendrik van Scharrel
- Abstrakt
There are grounds to assume that the use of nonpolitical, entertainment-oriented Social Media (SM) may dampen democratically relevant outcomes. However, research has largely ignored the political effects of such entertainment-oriented SM content as well as its interaction with exposure to political SM content. Based on the distinction between political and entertainment-oriented SM use, we developed a fourfold theoretical typology, “the Inactive”, “the News Avoiders”, “the Distracted”, and “the Focused”. Using data from a two-wave panel study (N = 559), we found that “the Focused” scored highest while the “the Inactive” and the “the News Avoiders” scored lowest on democratically relevant outcomes. Autoregressive panel analyses further revealed a positive effect of political SM exposure on low-effort political participation, but not on high-effort participation, political interest, and knowledge over time. Exposure to entertainment-oriented content on SM was associated with a decrease in high-effort political participation over time. For low-effort participation and political interest, the over-time effect of political SM exposure was dampened with rising levels of entertainment-oriented SM exposure, suggesting a distraction effect. Implications are discussed.
- Organisation(en)
- Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft
- Externe Organisation(en)
- MCI Management Center Innsbruck
- Journal
- Computers in Human Behavior
- Band
- 142
- ISSN
- 0747-5632
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107644
- Publikationsdatum
- 05-2023
- Peer-reviewed
- Ja
- ÖFOS 2012
- 508007 Kommunikationswissenschaft
- Schlagwörter
- ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
- Allgemeine Psychologie, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Human-computer interaction
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/b4dffb8c-1f1d-4746-9d3b-44f3df788909