A Three-dimensional Model of News Recirculation: Towards a Unified Understanding of News Sharing

ABSTRACT

This paper responds to calls for theory-building about news sharing on social media, arguing for a unified understanding of sharing practices both online and off. Developing a theoretical understanding of news sharing requires broadening our gaze to include other communicative technologies, such as postal mail, email, voice calls, and in-person conversation. In a conceptual contribution based on reflections about my participation in long-term multi-method collaborative studies in the US, I argue that news sharing is an act of commitment at the core. I also propose a three-dimensional model of news recirculation. The first two dimensions, publicness and ephemerality, are ideological – although they widely misrecognized as properties of specific channels and platforms. People enact a third dimension of practice, voice, when they recirculate news.

KEYWORDS:

• News sharing
• circulation
• epistemic commitment
• commitment events
• social media
• audience practices

Acknowledgments

Arrianna Marie Planey, Lavanya Murali, and John Voiklis talked through aspects of the argument with me. Magnus Pharao Hansen, Jessica Robles, and Susan Blum read various in-progress drafts and provided useful comments. Josh Raclaw and Abby Bajuniemi first called my attention to the richness of the excerpts toward the end of this paper; the brief discussion found here is much-abridged from a version first presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. All these scholars have helped me sharpen my thinking around these questions. I’m also grateful to Arrianna Marie Planey for allowing me to use one of her tweets as an example (the other is my own), and too many colleagues to count at Knology and PBS NewsHour, especially Patti Parson, Laura Santhanam, and John Voiklis for our ongoing conversations about news practices. Finally, I think the editor and the anonymous reviewers who made this a much stronger piece.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of course, many technical elements – including not just algorithms but older technologies like page layouts and television schedules – affect what we see and thus what we choose to share. However, this paper focuses on practices, what people do. Compare Carlson (2016, 918), who argues for the need to treat news sharing “as a cultural practice–that is, as contextualized, patterned action with interpretive consequences.”

2 News user activities that most directly inform this conceptual model include a series of 23 surveys (N = approx. 2,900) and 10 focus groups (N = approx. 60). We asked respondents in all surveys to indicate their interest in sharing a particular news story on social media, emailing that story, and describing it to someone. One series of surveys included an open-ended item asking participants to characterize their sharing habits in general, while another included open-ended follow-up items about conversations, which were only asked of those who said they were at least somewhat likely to share in conversation. Focus group questions focused on general news sharing habits, as well as interest in sharing or discussing particular news reports. All research activities were approved by Solutions IRB under protocol numbers 2016-07-17 and 2016-03-7 and/or TERC IRB under protocols number 55706 and KN9002.

3 As both Thurlow (2017) and Gershon (2010) note, the distinction between language ideologies, semiotic ideologies, and media ideologies is chiefly analytical, and the boundaries are by no means crisp.

4 This distinction does not hold up legally (Borchers 2017).

5 These conclusions are quite similar to those drawn by Duffy and Ling (2020), which we became aware of after completing the study.

6 See Litt (2012, 337), for an extended discussion of the features of particular sites at a particular moment in time.

7 Consider the discursive practice of "showing receipts," among other accountability practices that originated in Black Twitter (Brock 2020; Clark 2015, 2020).

8 Both replication and response – and in fact all social media sharing – are forms of re-entextualization, "the process by means of which a piece of ‘text’ … is extracted from its original context-of-use and re-inserted into an entirely different one, involving different participation frameworks, a different kind of textuality, … and ultimately also very different meaning outcomes" (Varis and Blommaert 2015, 8; see also Carlson 2016).

9 I am indebted to Magnus Pharao Hansen for this point.

10 All excerpts come from online surveys; I treat them here as interactions to highlight their dialogic nature (cf. Raclaw, Barchas-Lichtenstein, and Bajuniemi 2020)

Additional information

Funding

The data discussed in this paper were collected with support from the National Science Foundation under [Grant Number 15163471 and 1906802], and the National Institutes of Health under [Grant Number #1R25OD0202212-01A1]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.