Rethinking the Generational Gap in Online News Use: An Infrastructural Perspective
This research addresses the problem of understanding news consumption patterns for media researchers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing generational gap theories with a new methodological approach.
The study investigated the generational gap in online news usage between millennials and boomers by analyzing passively metered data from various news outlets, revealing a smaller gap than commonly assumed and highlighting the role of media infrastructure alongside preferences.
Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups,millennials and boomers,that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of shared usage obtained from passively metered usage data across a vast range of online news outlets for millennials and boomers. We compare each cohort's usage networks comprising various types of news websites. Our analyses reveal a smaller than commonly assumed generational gap in online news usage, with characteristics that manifest the multifarious effects of the infrastructural aspect of the media environment, alongside those of preferences.