Understanding today's convergent news media consumption through a triple articulation lens

Abstract

Today's news media environment is becoming increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous. As such, it becomes quite hard for communication researchers to approach the apparent complexity of media consumers\' everyday practices. In older days, media environments were rather straight forward, whereas today, due to the increasing trend of technological convergence, this media environment is rendered tremendously complex and hard to grasp; the boundaries between media and the ways we use them have collided (Jenkins, 2006) or liquefied (Deuze, 2011). Right now, various technological objects are used to consume a myriad of news materials, either in audiovisual or written form. Moreover, this consumption is nested in every possible scene of the everyday, as well in spatial as in social terms. Hence, we rather live in media than with media (Deuze, 2011), which brings about an abundance of possible news media repertoires. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel methodological approach to grasp this complexity in news consumption. Its theoretical foundations lie within domestication theory (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996), which represents the so-called ethnographic turn in audience research. Rather than just centring on media texts, it also incited to take into account contextual surrounding of media consumption, especially within the perimeter of the everyday. One of the major attractors of is the recognition of media meanings as derived from two distinct articulations: the affording objects on the one hand, and the media text itself on the other hand. Although context has always been of the utmost importance, domestication scholars often lost themselves in overly contextual descriptions, basically ignoring these texts and objects. In a recent theoretical and methodological account, Courtois et al. (in press) propose a triple articulation as a framework to study convergent media consumption, addressing equal weights to object, text and socio-spatial context meanings. In fact, socio-spatial context is conceived as a specific articulation because these meaningful circumstances constantly change throughout the day. As such, it has become one of the three crucial interacting components that direct people's meaning making process when it comes to their media consumption. The proposed methodology entails a semi-structured face-to-face interview based on photo-elicited card sorts of objects, texts and socio-spatial context. It is directed towards uncovering the influence each articulation exercises in making up the overall meaning of media consumption. More specifically, it allows uncovering the specific roles of objects, texts and socio-spatial contexts in diverse media consumption repertoires. The results clearly show that each of the proposed articulation plays crucial roles in understanding why people use the news media in the way they do: although each articulation has the potential to affect meaning, it is clear that there is a deepening divide between news media consumers. Nonetheless, drawing upon insights in the everyday, this paper for instance helps to understand why some certain proportion of consumers stick to traditional news media repertoires, while others fully embrace modern technological means like smartphones, in a wide array of contexts