Over the past three decades, our media ecologies have substantially transformed, changing how people get in touch with the news. These changes have also led to higher variability in news access across users’ daily lives. Using the microcosm of mobile news consumption as a proxy for the changes in our general news use, we explore types of mobile news access and mobile news repertoires and their relations to users’ tendency to talk about the news. Our exploratory study aims to describe intra- and inter-personal variations in mobile news use. By taking this fine-grained perspective on mobile news use, we provide a more comprehensive assessment than cross-sectional studies, which is valuable to researchers and practitioners in mobile news.

In light of the controversial relationship and blurred lines between information and entertainment media, the current study's goal aimed at qualitatively exploring media entertainment's role in emerging adults' political identity formation and engagement. By analyzing 55 semistructured interviews from Germany, Croatia, Turkey, South Korea, and the Philippines, we examined how emerging adults in 5 countries-differing in tightnesslooseness, political culture, and media freedom-explore alternative political identities (identity exploration) and commit to a set of political values (identity commitment). Across countries, notable similarities supported the notion of traditional and new forms of entertainment as universal drivers of political identity formation and engagement (e.g., informational source, broadening one's horizon). However, idiosyncrasies of countries reflected unique cultural values, beliefs, and norms, and the benefits of media entertainment pathways to political identity development appeared to depend on political freedom and democracy.

As journalists are expected to report on events where expectations and rules are transgressed, they often report on moral violations (such as murder, tax evasion, or unjust political decisions). Exposed to journalistic reports on violations of their moral principles, individuals instantly feel that these actions are wrong. According to theories of morality, immorality perceptions are associated with specific cognitive and affective reactions. In two studies, we used the concept of a moral dyad to (a) define moral news content and (b) analyze emotional reactions and memory effects of intuitive perceptions of immorality. In both studies, immorality led to higher levels of anger and compassion, but impaired memory with effects hinging on perception of immorality. These perceptions further did not differ across different presentations of dyads. Our findings show the usefulness to employ a lens of morality to look at the entire news production and reception process.

Concerns have been expressed that permanent online connectedness might negatively affect media user’s stress levels. Most research has focused on negative effects of specific media usage patterns, such as media multitasking or communication load. In contrast, users’ cognitive orientation toward online content and communication has rarely been investigated. Against this backdrop, we examined whether this cognitive orientation (i.e., online vigilance with its three dimensions salience, reactibility, monitoring) is related to perceived stress at different timescales (person, day, and situation level), while accounting for the effects of multitasking and communication load. Results across three studies showed that, in addition to multitasking (but not communication load), especially the cognitive salience of online communication is positively related to stress. Our findings are discussed regarding mental health implications and the origins of stress.

Over the past three decades our media ecologies have changed substantially, not at least changing the ways in which we get in touch with the news. These changes have led both to high hopes for more equality in news access and a better-informed electorate, as well as fears of news avoidance, filter bubbles, and increasing knowledge gaps, with recent empirical evidence leaning towards rather pessimistic perspectives. However, most of the research to date focusses on one specific kind of news access, e.g., news consumption via social media, and its effects, neglecting the fact that users combine several ways to access the news throughout their daily lives, creating their individual media use repertoires. In order to disentangle these variances within our daily lives from differences between users, we need to analyze access to news on a situational level. Being meta-media, mobile media constitute an excellent microcosmos to study situational variability in news access. Hence, we investigated the situational types of mobile news access in young adults’ daily lives as well as their mobile news repertoires based on the previously identified situational access types. To do so, we conducted an experience sampling study among young adults in Germany. Our results highlight that differences within (mobile) news use should not only be studied as differences between people, but also as variances within users’ daily lives. For example, we see that no mobile news repertoire in our study solely relies on news access via intermediaries such as social media.

Given that news stories feature many morally-laden topics, this study investigated the effect of moral conflict in news stories on entertainment experiences and learning outcomes. We propose that a reader's perception of moral conflict in a non-fictional news story will lead to the cognitively engaging experience of appreciation, which is characterized as thought-provoking, moving, and meaningful. Moreover, we suggest that this experience will impact two aspects of knowledge gain: the acquisition of knowledge (objective knowledge) and the perception of having learned something (subjective knowledge). To investigate whether the perception of moral conflict and the experience of appreciation hampers or fosters knowledge gain, an online experiment was conducted in which participants (N= 334) read a feature story that was manipulated to induce the perception of moral conflict. Our results demonstrated that a news article perceived as morally conflicting led to more appreciation than one that was not perceived as morally conflicting. Our findings provide insight into the relationship between perceived moral conflict and learning outcomes, that is, knowledge acquisition and subjective knowledge, and the role of entertainment experiences in this relationship. Results are discussed in relation to the influence of entertainment experiences on learning.

The rise of digital communication brings about dramatic challenges for theories of communication (and social sciences in general), but also opportunities and problems regarding the expansion of empirical methods employed to study human communication and its manifold digital traces. A team of German communication scholars at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and at the University of Mainz held an international conference in Hanover with both young and experienced scholars in February 2018 to promote the development of collective, cross-institutional strategies for computational communication science (CCS). The key findings and learnings from the conference are documented in this conference report. We intend to stimulate organizational and collaborative efforts in establishing infrastructures, knowledge bases, standards of best practice, and a spirit of solidarity among interested scholars to push the field's digital-methodological progress and to compensate for different starting conditions that scholars and institutions are facing on their journey into the digital future.

Smartphones and other mobile devices have fundamentally changed patterns of Internet use in everyday life by making online access constantly available. The present paper offers a theoretical explication and empirical assessment of the concept of online vigilance, referring to users' permanent cognitive orientation towards online content and communication as well as their disposition to exploit these options constantly. Based on four studies, a validated and reliable self-report measure of online vigilance was developed. In combination, the results suggest that the Online Vigilance Scale (OVS) shows a stable factor structure in various contexts and user populations and provides future work in communication, psychology, and other social sciences with a new measure of the individual cognitive orientation towards ubiquitous online communication.

Based on assumptions from entertainment theory, an online-study (N = 419) was conducted to investigate the differential relationships between enjoyment and appreciation of a video clip that dealt with the features of natural gas as fuel for cars, objective and subjective knowledge about the content of that clip, and behavioral intentions of dealing with the topic of natural gas. Structural equation modeling revealed that enjoyment was directly positively related to objective and subjective knowledge. However, objective knowledge did not predict and subjective knowledge was only weakly associated with behavioral intentions. Appreciation, in contrast, was directly negatively related to knowledge acquisition and not related to subjective knowledge, but was the best predictor for behavioral intentions. These results point to the distinct processes and relationships of different entertainment experiences. Implications for entertainment education and online video portals are discussed. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Within Hofstede’s framework of individualistic and collectivistic cultures, this contribution examines measurement equivalence of hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment motivations in two different cultures, namely Germany representing a more individualistic culture (N = 180) and Turkey representing a more collectivistic culture (N = 97). By means of a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we could secure configural invariance for both hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment motivations across the German and Turkish sample. Metric invariance, however, could only be obtained for hedonic, but not for eudaimonic motivations. Scalar invariance was obtained for neither of the two entertainment motivations. The study points to the importance of equivalence testing when conducting cross-cultural research.

In contrast to the prominent individualistic view on self-disclosure, this study focuses on self-disclosure in groups of prior acquaintances that both meet offline and communicate online. It compares within-group self-disclosure between offline face-to-face (FtF) interactions and online communication via mobile messaging applications (MMAs). An online-survey (N = 357) was conducted to test for differences between within-group self-disclosure online and offline across four dimensions (amount, depth, breadth, valence). The results show that there is more amount, more breadth and more depth for offline within-group self-disclosure, but it is less positively valenced than online within-group self-disclosure. Interestingly, the mere frequency of communication is higher in an MMA environment. In spite of the permanent availability of the online communication sphere, group members do not permanently disclose personal information to each other online. Thus, for within-group self-disclosure, offline time seems quality time. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

While intrinsic motivation has received broad attention in recent entertainment research, the effects of extrinsic motivation, such as social pressure to use media, on media enjoyment remain unknown. Based on an online-survey (N=230), this study tested the effects of intrinsic need satisfaction and perceived social pressure on the enjoyment of Facebook use with structural equation modeling. The results reveal complex effects of extrinsic motivation: While social pressure negatively affected autonomy need satisfaction, it was positively related to competence and relatedness need satisfaction. This study is the first to develop and test a theoretical model of entertainment experience in the context of social media use and to theoretically integrate the role of extrinsic need satisfaction in media enjoyment.