10: Early findings

The loss of a common mass-media experience and the normality of pluriform micro media is disorienting. It makes it difficult to anticipate expectations and understanding of my readers. If I tell you ‘Joe spends two hours a day on social media’, what do you think that entails? My sense is that many of us assume that means Joe does something similar to what we each would do for two hours on social media.

Forty interviews may not sound like a lot, but an hour-long conversation about daily media use with forty people from different walks of life reveals a lot about how narrow and out of touch a lot of perceptions about media use are. Can I make claims about the use of the population at this point? No. Can I paint a picture more accurate than the one that underpins most of what I read from people who work in or professionally write about media? Yes.

I’ll focus on the four preliminary findings I find most notable. As a quick reminder, this draws from an inductive stage of research. We did not enter with hypotheses or looking to prove or disprove anything. Rather we perceived we didn’t know much about daily media use and asked questions to learn more.

Deliberate users 
People are using media deliberately. Most blend use of a variety of media forms (video, audio, words) every day but illustrate considerable range in what they use and why (including those over age 70). And while they may use the same forms of media (social media, streamed audio and video, some broadcast), there was little duplication in the content they accessed.

Not all of our age 70+ interviewees have adopted a full range of digital media, but some have, and on down the age ranges our interviewees told us about their use and the reasons for it with great detail. The biggest variation that emerged was the variability in how important media was, a factor strongly moderated by available leisure time. In my world of reading the opining of people who work in media, there is a failure to recognize that media is not the most important part of most lives. Media use is a significant part of leisure, but contemporary life – especially of those who work and care for families – leaves very little room for leisure.

As a result, media use tends to be patterned (habitual/routine) and ease of experience is important, even most important. Those who deeply love media will behave the way media makers imagine and research, search out, and engage in fannish behavior. But most media users aren’t looking to work for their leisure. I suspect this explains a lot about the attention dominance of YouTube and Netflix – they have become default sources; social media too, but in a complementary way I’ll get to shortly.

Specialization 
Along with importance of media, the specialization of content used emerged as a strong variable for understanding differences in use. Given the expanded choice and control of digital-era media, I expected more specialized use than typical of the ‘mass-media era’ – meaning that people would pursue and build media diets based on media content of interest. I did not anticipate that those diets would be as specialized as we observed.

We thought about specialization as made up of two components. First, to what degree did users seek out media generally (I watch the news during dinner) or seek to use specific content (I watch the news on Channel 7 at 6p). The second way we considered specialization was in assessing the precise content interviewees talked about engaging with and whether it was ‘mass’ content – the type of content long available that was designed to attract broad audiences, ‘mid’, which we considered content that existed in the predigital era but was considered ‘niche’, so third-tier sports (soccer), public broadcasters, and ‘cable’ content (these are classifications specific to Australian media culture), or ‘micro’ which involved media diets largely reliant on media content that wouldn’t have existed in the predigital era due to its lack of capacity to attract the audience scale needed to be commercially viable.

Most of our interviewees had diets that blended mid and micro media. Roughly 40 percent had diets dominated by micro media with another 25 percent that blended micro and mid. Part of this might be the weakness of Australian television relative to the US and UK, but I suspect it isn’t unusual in small and mid-size markets where domestic  television now struggles with the diminished ad spending that remade the print sector early in the century. When we focus only on ‘YouTube’ or ‘Netflix’ we overlook that viewers are widely spread across those libraries.

Personal media stream  
One of the most revealing parts of the interviews was coming to understand how much of social media use is quite different than what the 2010s led us to imagine. Very little social media use involves posts from people known to the user or part of a social network. Rather, for most, social media use has two modes: ‘explore’ (what happens when in fully algorithmic features often called ‘For You’ or ‘Explore’) and ‘following’ (feeds of followed content or that blend followed with that algorithmically recommend). Following functions were more preferred and enable users to effectively construct personalized television channels that deliver a mix of content related to their often-idiosyncratic interests. Users describe turning to following functions when they have more extended time for leisure – after work, when dinner is over and the kids are in bed or otherwise settled, and explore functions more in the short bursts of ‘filling time’ or when seeking the wider range of content delivered in that mode. Per the deliberate use, they talk about using different features at different times for different reasons.

I highlight this as ‘like a personalized television channel’ for a couple reasons. First, many in their 30s and 40s used their social media feed precisely in the way I used television when I flipped around to see what ‘was on’ in the leisure point in my day many years ago. Also because so much of the feeds are video. In April 2024, Meta shared that more than 60% of time spent on Facebook and Instagram was spent watching video – another big change from our early 2010s imagination of social media. Add that to the known amount of viewing spent on TikTok (we ultimately categorized TikTok and YouTube Shorts as social media because of their feed-based experience) and the nature of a personal ‘television’ stream becomes clear. We did not have many TikTok users in our interviews (even those in their late 20s and early 30s told us they were ‘too old’, though that might change). [We got some valuable insight into YouTube use but not enough to share because it was so varied].

The personal media stream also valuably reinforces the first two findings of deliberate users and specialization. The interviews dove deeply into what people do when using social media and revealed a stunning range of norms and recognition of the different functions. I don’t deny that platform design and algorithms structure and shape use, just that users are more active in choosing how to engage with them then a lot of discussions acknowledge. Further, social media is being deliberately used by many to construct a personal media stream that delivers material relevant to their specific interests. Most of our interviewees had three or four key interests and valued their social media feed for delivering on these topics.

Information 
A final finding was of the extent of information seeking and information consumption. This caught us by surprise because we’ve tended to tie news and information together – which makes sense given that is what the bundled newspaper of the 20^th century provided. But we observed news and information consumption are quite differentiated in many media diets (mostly via Google search and YouTube, not social media). Several interviewees described news avoidance but had diets full of information seeking. If we categorize news (as the Reuters Digital News Index does) as ‘national, international, regional/local and other topical events’, we can see how YouTube videos about aeronautical engineering, financial management, gardening, and how-to-videos exist as information quite different from news through which users embrace media to answer their questions about the world in a way difficult in the predigital era. Information seeking transcends YouTube but emerges as motivating the curiosity that drives some to scroll feeds and others to investigate topics as wide-ranging as their health concerns, favorite football teams, and interests through a variety of internet searching.   

Things we didn’t find. We were careful – as sections 8 and 9 suggest – not to impose our language or categories in the conversations. Some of the absences are as interesting as what did turn up. No one talked about business categories like ad-supported versus subscriber-funded, and no one mentioned FAST. A few younger interviewees mentioned dropping streaming video services because of cost, but no one complained about cost and many complained a lot about the increased ad load on Facebook and Instagram and described it as a contributing factor in not watching ‘TV’. It isn’t clear that most users draw lines between ‘creator and corporate’ media (or between ‘hosted and licensed’). And why would they?

Researching how and why people use media has always been time consuming and difficult to present concisely. But it is very clear that an extraordinary gap exists between what people are actually doing and why they do so and what is commonly perceived by industry, policymakers, and scholars. The challenge is even greater now given that there isn’t any ‘dominant norm’ or behavior – there doesn’t seem to be much true of ‘most people’.

We’re going to spend the next few years learning more about what people are doing and trying to figure out ways to group and understand that behavior. As we used to say, ‘stay tuned’, or now, ‘be sure to like, share, and subscribe’ ;)