Paying Attention to News Briefs about Innovative Technologies

News sources about innovative technologies like Google's driverless car and Apple's Siri feature can help potential users evaluate the benefits and risks involved. However, individuals must pay attention to this information before they can make sense of it, and decide to change their technology trusting intention. While other fields investigate attention, no research to date has investigated why people pay attention to news briefs about innovative technologies. We propose four factors based on information processing theory. An exploratory study in which respondents are given a series of news briefs and asked how much they paid attention to them and why, provides support for four of our eight propositions. We find the strongest reasons for paying attention/(disregarding) the news briefs are the positive/(negative) nature of the news brief content characteristics. However, the biggest changes in trust are from positive and negative technology involvement factors.