Academic breakfast with Erik Knudsen
2024-05-23 09:00 - 09:45 (Europe/Oslo) | Vrimearealet, SV-bygget, 3.etasje
The SV-faculty invites all students and employees at UiB to attend Erik Knudsens presentation about news avoiders in Norway.
Have you found yourself consciously avoiding news or specific news topics over the past year? For instance, have you refrained from clicking on stories about the dire situations in Ukraine or Gaza? If so, you’re not alone. New figures from the Media Survey 2024 reveal that a whopping 34 percent of Norwegians are classified as “news avoiders.” Is it a democratic issue that so many people are dodging the news? Should news avoiders feel guilty? Erik Knudsen doesn’t think so. He discusses his research on people’s selective media consumption and news avoidance, citing results from the Media Survey 2024 recently presented at the Nordic Media Days. Knudsen will also offer insights from an ongoing MediaFutures study on whether so-called “constructive news” – solution-oriented news that emphasizes hope and possibilities over negativity – could serve as a kind of “antidote” to reduce news avoidance.
Erik Knudsen is an associate professor at the Department of Information and Media Studies and works as work package 1 leader in SFI MediaFutures.

Political news analysis by YouTubers : Initial results from quantitative processing of a textual corpus
2024-05-31 12:00 - 13:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
MediaFutures Work Package 1 and The Network for culture, inequality and democracy (KUD/CID) at Infomedia invite to a public lecture on the topic of alternative political analysis on YouTube, given by Quentin Gilliotte, Professeur Junior at Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris, France) There will be time for a Q&A.
The productions on digital platforms are becoming an increasingly significant source of information. Within this context, a large number of actors on digital platforms offer analyses and commentary on political current events. Within the Francophone space, we find video creators such as HugoDécrypte, Tatiana Ventôse, Usul, and Gaspard G. These actors place themselves in opposition to traditional media (television, radio) : they advocate for an “alternative” way of handling information, whether in terms of the audience they target, the topics they cover, or the formats they use. How do these different actors address political current events? Considering both economic models and political positions, what topics are mobilized?
The communication will proceed in two stages. Firstly, I will present the method for constructing the corpus of selected channels through data extraction from the YouTube API, utilizing network analysis tools. Secondly, I will present a mapping of the topics addressed by these different video creators based on the automated textual analysis of a corpus of 8740 transcribed videos (representing all videos published by the selected actors between January and July 2023) using a topic modeling method (Latent Dirichlet Allocation).

Making sense of news audiences and their experiences: Practices and responses to news in the age of datafication
2024-06-18 09:00 - 11:00 | Room 514, Fosswinckels gate 6
Welcome to the Final Seminar of our Ph.D Marianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus.
Commentator: Assistant Professor Joëlle Swart (University of Groningen).
On June 18th, the Department of Information Science and Media Studies organizes a PhD Final Seminar for candidate Marianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus. The Final Seminar takes place toward the end of the PhD period, when the candidate is a few months away from submitting their thesis.
Commentator: Joëlle Swart, University of Groningen.
Title: Making sense of news audiences and their experiences: Practices and responses to news in the age of datafication
This thesis explores how people relate to news as experience. I ask how news audiences’ experiences can be captured and how these experiences can help provide a more profound understanding of how people relate to news in everyday life.
Hidden practices
While audiences have become increasingly central to journalistic practices and academic discussions about journalism, the understanding of audiences’ practices and behaviors are paradoxically dominated by professional measures and quantification of user data like clicks, time spent, and sales rather than audiences’ own experiences with news. A central aim of this thesis is to explore hidden aspects of people’s news consumption not found in digital traces and thereby advance a phenomenologically grounded understanding of experiences that shape interactions with news.
To answer these questions, I have conducted recurring interviews and media diaries with news audiences, supplemented with video ethnography and data donations. This empirical material is analyzed through four articles. The first article explicates the overarching term ‘media experience’ as an analytical concept to capture key insights about mediated lives in digital societies. The second article zooms in on the experiences of young adults who do not pay for news and their considerations for not subscribing to digital news subscriptions. The third article critically assesses the metric of ‘time spent’ by analyzing how people navigate when reading news online and how short bursts of news use relate to meaningful experiences. Finally, the fourth article offers a conceptualization of ‘news experience’ as an analytical lens to understand how people relate to news in everyday life, empirically grounded in six distinct forms of news experience.
A holistic approach
The thesis highlights the significance of a holistic approach to understanding people’s complex practices and behaviors. Whereas research and news professionals predominantly have made sense of people’s news use through cognitive approaches that highlight agency and intentionality, this thesis also emphasizes experiential qualities, which encompasses sensory, affective, perceptional, technological, and social dimension.

Mid-term evaluation of PhD candidate Khadiga Seddik
2025-04-04 14:00 - 15:00 | SFI MediaFutures, MCB
On Friday, April 4th, PhD candidate Khadiga Seddik will have her mid-term evaluation.
Main supervisor: Erik Knudsen
Co-Supervisor: Damian Trilling, Alain Starke (Step-in)
External Evaluator: Sole Pera

Title: The Influence of News Recommender technology on Shaping Selective Exposure and Sharing.
Abstract:
Despite the benefits the news recommenders provide, overly personalized news recommendations and too much exposure to like-minded news can pose a threat to democracy by leading to filter bubble, echo-chambers, and political polarization. These negative consequences are not given, but they could depend on conditions and factors under which news recommenders amplify or reduce selective exposure. Many studies argue that news recommenders can be programmed to promote factors that reduce selective exposure because they are programmed by human beings, and they are dependent on the decisions surrounding the implementation and design of the technology. However, programming recommender systems to shape selective exposure is not a straightforward task, as we don’t know which factors the recommenders should be designed to promote, as well as how the recommenders should promote them. In this research project I investigate the heavily debated consequences of news recommender technologies, selective exposure and selective of like-minded news. The aim is to shift the scholarly attention from uncovering whether the current recommenders amplify or reduce selective exposure to understanding the conditions under which recommender systems do so, given that they are designed for that purpose. By doing so, we shift the responsibility for the democratic implications of recommenders from the technology itself to the decisions surrounding the implementation and design.
The project is a part of a larger project, the NEWSREC project (https://www.newsrec.ai). The main objective of NEWSREC project is to study, understand, and assess the precise conditions under which algorithmic news recommenders have positive or negative effects on the democratic role of the news media by focusing on both the input side and the output side of news recommenders.
