Main Takeaways from Lee Rainie’s Research Symposium Keynote Address at the BEA2018 Convention

By Gabriela Martínez

 

On April 8, Lee Rainie, the director of Internet, Science and Technology at the Pew Research Center shared observations and trends culled from surveys that examine people’s online activities and their use of social media platforms.  Here are some of the main takeaways from his speech.

  1. Today’s media is place agnostic and it runs on its own time.

It does not matter the time or the place. Audiences are able to access their own news when they want. “People are running their own playlist on their own time in their own way,” Rainie said. There is no centralized source of information. People become aware of the latest news from their friends and their social networks online.

  1. Most people get their news from social media platforms

 In his presentation, Rainie compared two surveys from 2016 and 2017. They showed that          more U.S. adults are getting news from social media. The results from a 2016 survey shows that 62 percent, two-thirds, of U.S. adults are getting news from social media. This number increased to 67 percent in 2017. There has also been a rapid growth of mobile connection to news. Most people get their news on their phone, not their desktops.

  1. Engagement on social media platforms is becoming increasingly politicized

   “When we do analysis of the most important predictors of someone’s engagement with lots of communication media now, partisanship and ideology now vastly are the most important elements, the screens through which people pass information,” Rainie said. It’s much more important than the stuff that used to anchor social science, like their education model, like their ethnicity, like their age, like their religious affiliation.”

Partisan views are more likely to be the lens through which people analyze information, Rainie said.

  1. The new media environment has six new attention zones.

 In his presentation, Rainie singled out six attention zones: signal, snacking, social streams, split screen, binging and synthesized spaces. In the signal zone, people can set alarms to receive updates on a topic or news event that they are following. When people are “snacking” on information, they are consuming information out of boredom when they are waiting for something else to happen. In the social streams zone, people spend time browsing a general feed of information, usually posted by friends on social media. “People spend a bunch of time, sort of dipping their dipper into the stream of information that’s flowing past them. They don’t want to check up on everything for everyone,” Rainie said. In the split screen zone, audiences are looking at media on multiple screens. Their attention is divided. They might be watching the season finale of a show, but also looking at reactions and comments on Twitter.

In the binging zone, people consume a large amount of information on their own time.

Synthesized spaces, a zone that is still developing, is media tailored to the consumer’s taste. This usually is made possible by data recollection on social media platforms.

“Media now is essentially a body part. and a body enhancer, in an age where we’re moving towards having our own personal agents to do some of our work for us.” Rainie said.

 

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