How individuals inform themselves on the Internet

When a 22-year-old engages on social media like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, they don't just want to connect and write with others, they want to keep up with what's going on. The person is more or less aware that the platform uses algorithms so that they receive information and advertising tailored to their personal interests, needs and wishes. And they think that's a good thing, too, because perhaps the company is thus bringing to light desires and needs of the person that they never imagined would exist.  A 16-year-old, on the other hand, who is involved in a climate initiative of the Fridays for future movement and is always on a quest for facts and arguments to discuss with climate change proponents and deniers, is quite critical of this algorithmic information feed as they show you only what you "want" to see and not all that would be necessary to form a freely objective opinion. 

These two perspectives of two young people who move differently on the Internet and on social media show how the social media structure has developed in recent years and how differently individuals look for information: While the 22-year-old receives information passively and sees it more as a form of entertainment, the 16-year-old actively searches for information and sees the social medium as having a duty to support him in his active search. 

It is hard to imagine life without social media when it comes to searching for information and exchanging opinions on socially relevant topics. At the same time, traditional media such as television, daily and weekly newspapers, and print media in general are disappearing somewhat, because they are no longer the only natural sources from which we can get a picture of current world events - yet they are not falling because the Corona crisis has made them more important again due to their seriousness.

Changes in information behavior

Current empirical findings confirm this development. Our surveys from September 2020 show that television is still the most important medium for almost forty percent of individuals between 18 and 35, despite the general decline. For almost one in two, the Internet has become the most important medium - but " only" as nearly 98 percent in this age group use the Internet on a regular basis. Radio and print, on the other hand, are lagging behind in their relevance for information viewing, with just seven and eight percent respectively. It is clear, however, that the older individuals get, the more important traditional media such as radio and print become.

Because the Internet as a universal medium unites a large number of very different services and information providers under one technical roof, we have to differentiate further. One in three of those who use the Internet as their main information medium, two-thirds of them use services and offerings from traditional media (e.g., the websites of Tagesschau, France Info, NPR, NY Times or Daily Mirror). Only eight percent use blogs or even social media as a source of information. But here, too, there is a clear age effect: The younger the age group, the higher the proportion of those who use the new information options offered by social media channels. Among individuals under the age of 25, these are already on a par with traditional journalistic services. 

These figures provide a first insight into the social and media change we are undergoing and which will continue. Understanding this change and shaping it democratically is an eminently important task, because we need a functioning media landscape in order to share knowledge about upcoming issues of broad relevance and to exchange arguments that actually help us form our opinions. At its best, then, the landscape is that place where social conflicts become visible and debates are held about values and goals that should ultimately shape our society and sustain it cohesively. The communicative is to be united together with a sociological view, so that the question "How do media influence individuals and individuals influence media?" becomes a relevant question and the answer produces clearer results.

The particular appeal of social media is that, on the one hand, it lowers the barriers to a person being able to share information of all kinds with others, and on the other hand, it allows people to maintain existing relationships with others and to catch new ones. In other words, they allow us each to engage in individual, even proprietary practices of identity, relationship, and information management. For adolescents and young adults up to the age of 25 in particular, they are therefore essential communication spaces for presenting one's own interests, abilities, preferences and experiences and for obtaining feedback from the (extended) social environment. At the same time, social media help us find our way in the world and obtain relevant information for ourselves - this applies in particular to the information about sociopolitical issues already mentioned as well as information that comes from our immediate social environment and would never make it onto the front page of a local newspaper for good reason (for example, whether Tom is still with Barbara or what math homework needs to be done). 

Social media have an intermediary effect

Social media thus provide their users with tools to engage in a wide variety of communicative practices. In doing so, they usually make a very far-reaching promise of participation, which comes to the fore precisely in the officially formulated goals and statements. YouTube, for example, states that it seeks to give all individuals a voice to represent their own world. Twitter promises all users that their media use will enable them to communicate and share ideas and information instantly and without any obstacles. And Facebook wants to empower individuals to create communities and bring the world closer together.

In this sense, the respective platform operators usually emphasize that these offerings are to be understood as a content-neutral infrastructure via which natural and legal persons can disseminate all conceivable content. However, this characterization obscures the fact that social media are by no means information brokers in the neutral sense, but rather track user behavior through their software design and underlying business model, thus highly shaping the structures of the digital public sphere. In short, social media act as intermediaries that do not produce or provide content themselves, but set the stage for others to do so. This intermediation, in turn, does not happen randomly or by chance, but follows certain principles of which three are particularly important:

• Decluttering and refocusing information: In social media, information is not presented to us at specific times in specific places (e.g., the Tagesschau news at 8 p.m. on ARD, NPR news only every hour on the hour, or the daily newspaper in the morning in the newspaper tube). Instead, news circulates there in microformat, i.e., in the smallest communicative units as a tweet, feed, status update or small video. They bundle into a constant stream of information that is constantly updated with new content. This may include journalistic texts, public statements by companies and brands, advertising by communications agencies, strategic and persuasive communications content from politicians, political parties, and organizations, as well as private opinions from the user's own environment. Behind this re-bundling is a filtering service that, for social, is primarily not based on editorial aspects, but on my personal interests and wishes. Ultimately, this means that everyone is responsible for deciding for themselves which features a piece of information possesses. 
  
  
• Personalization of information: This results in an information structure that is relevant from a subjective point of view, which also benefits advertising. We are therefore only shown what we are actually interested in. However, algorithmic personalization requires the creation of profiles that are as detailed as possible and contain data on every conceivable activity and characteristic that users display in social media. 
  
  
• Convergence of conversation and publication: Different modes of communication, long strictly separable and recognizable as such, are blurring and becoming one. While publishing content used to be the exclusive preserve of journalists, today anyone can produce individual content without it having to be factually accurate. As a result, an individual opinion loses its substance so it is no longer apparent what is true or false. Moreover, there is no longer any need for personal contact between two or more people at a specific, predetermined location. Because these two modes merge, it now becomes visible what individuals have always done with journalistic texts: shared, recommended, discussed, and criticized. In short, they use them to form their own opinions, because that is always a social process as well.

Out of filter bubbles and echo chambers

The organizational principles just described thus change the way we inform ourselves about sociopolitically relevant issues and form opinions that are acceptable to us. In the public debate, the filter bubble as well as the echo chamber have long been at the center of events. They describe communication spaces in which individuals are only confronted with information and opinions that confirm their own worldview and ignore the real world - people have their "rose-colored glasses" on, so to speak, and hypocritically oppose everything that cannot be reconciled with their (almost always) narcissistic nature. So they warn against threats to the diversity of information and...