Abstract
My work concerns the question of information usage in the information age. Information usage is one of the classic questions of medium psychology (Trepte 1999) and is consulted again and again in the Medium uses science as basis for further research (Saxer 1998). The question about formal selection criteria is one of the basic questions of the medium sciences (Donsbach 1988).
The focus of my study is content usage on the Internet, which will be examined on specific subjective and formal aspects. My work narrows its focus on the usage of news stories.
The analysis of news usage with a strong communications scientific perspective is concerned more with the exploration of user behavior than with their deep-seated contents of consciousness. The exclusion of this content was provided for in order to ensure that the analysis could take place on the basis of formal criteria, which are decisive for the selection process.
Formal criteria for reading news in the Internet taken into consideration were: placement of a news story on a page, navigation by scroll bars, frames, page layout including colour, degree of integration with other content through links, multimedia elements (gif animations, video, sound, graphics, databases, statistics), story length, etc..
This work can be summarised into three concrete questions:
- Which type of news stories addresses which population group?
- Which variables influence the information usage behavior of Internet users?
- Which criteria specifically attract the so-called information elite?
To answer these questions a multi-method-study consisting of usage tracking and questionnaire was carried out. In the study, which already took place in June 1999, the effect of different arguments - in this case the formal criteria of the presentation of news in the Internet - was examined. The analysis took place quantitatively via a frequency analysis of the obtained page visits.
First it had to be clarified which types of news presentation are found on the Internet. The result: there are three basic types: 1.) extremely compact, 2.) highly hyperlinked and 3.) multimedia-focussed presentations. In the experiment, users had to chose between these three presentation types. These three types were installed by me within a single editorial unit - in this case the news channel of the technology-oriented site ZDNet Germany.
After one month and 1552 completed questionnaires the results show: A majority of users (26.946) selected the hyperlink-rich presentations. Slightly fewer (25.916) selected the short versions. Here the external influences such as time and online costs lead to the fact that in many cases usage takes place as rapidly as possible. Comparatively few users (18.286) chose the multimedia-rich versions. |
