News sharing as reciprocal exchanges in social cohesion maintenance

ABSTRACT

This paper examines digital news sharing between news consumers, often via social media, as a form of reciprocal exchange. Reciprocity is the informal exchange of goods and favors between people for mutual benefit and to maintain social cohesion. The study draws on seven focus groups of mobile news users of ages 18 to over 66 to explore the structure of news sharing and reciprocity, the values attached to shared news and the norms underpinning exchange behavior. Findings show that news reciprocity manifests in direct and indirect exchanges. The interviewees note that news sharing is neither haphazard nor casual. It involves strategic actions playing on implicit standards to optimize mutual offerings of news that are instrumentally and symbolically valuable. The data show that notions of reciprocity shape how often and in what form people share news with friends, for example, using chat apps to guarantee responses. Participants exchanged news items they felt would help the relationship prosper and thrive just as they avoided those that they thought would offend. Thus, the exchange of news becomes an element in the maintenance and development of social relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• News sharing
• reciprocity
• digital
• mobile
• WhatsApp
• social cohesion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Debbie Goh researches the civic and social implications of the use of information and communication technologies. She received her PhD from Indiana University Bloomington [email: [email protected]].

Richard Ling is the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at Nanyang Technological University. Ling studies the social consequences of mobile communication. He has writtenThe mobile connection,New Tech, New TiesandTaken for grantedness. He is editor-in-chief of theJournal of Computer-Mediated Communication,co-editor ofMobile Media and Communicationand the Oxford University Press SeriesStudies in Mobile Communication.He is a fellow of the International Communication Association [email: [email protected]].

Liuyu Huang is a research project officer at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. She graduated with a Master of Science from NTU [email: [email protected]].

Doris Liew is an Economics undergraduate with a minor in Public Policy and Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Her studies encompass neoliberal economic theory, econometrics, finance and development, and international relations [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Debbie Goh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4948-8073

Notes

1 Only two participants in the baby boomer group said they rarely accessed news on their phones.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore; grant number MOE2015-T2-1-042.