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be able to turn meaningless grunts into spoken and written words, through which people are able to make known their needs, wants, ideas, and feelings.
The topic of intrapersonal communications is a complex process. In order to evolve an understanding of intrapersonal communications for the young, use
was made of a non-proportional stratified sample of the population of younger adults, this being the 220 students who were involved in the study that
formed the basis of the survey. All of them were issued with questionnaires. The age of the participants ranged from between twenty to thirty-three.
The validity of the content was high. The subject of intrapersonal communications has many implications for us in the real world. My investigation aims to
discover models of internal communications that are used by young people.
PP 086
News in Social Media – Young Peoples’ Use and Interpretation
A. Bergström
1
, M. Jervelycke Belfrage
1
1
University of Gothenburg, Journalism- Media and Communication, Gothenburg, Sweden
News environment is rapidly changing and legacy media are suffering from shrinking audience shares. Parallel, news distribution on digital platforms is
gaining in use and respect. In this context, we are moving from a traditional news cycle dominated by journalistic professionals to a more complex informa‑
tion cycle that integrates ordinary people. Social media users can act as content brokers who publicize and interpret media content, and has proven to play
the role of making people aware of important news.With so called user-distributed content, there is always an aspect of recommendation involved. Opinion
leaders in the original conceptualization by Katz and Lazarsfelt were emphasized as nodes that connect media and their interpersonal networks, and are
most likely equally essential in the flow of communication in social media networks (SNS). Many studies show how people like, share and recommend
news stories in their digital networks. Studies of criteria for news selectivity in social media contexts are scarce, however. There are a few pointing out social
endorsement to be a stronger predictor of news in SNS’s than was source cues, that news coupled with opinion and personalization are highly appreciated
and that users prefer recommendations from friends and family as from journalists and news organisations. New patterns for consuming media is also
connected to yet another aspect of coming across news, a phenomenon referred to as incidental news consumption. Although incidental consumption per
se is not a new phenomenon, it has, due to the increased rate and the amount of news available through SNS’s, come to play a greater role. The constant
flow of news in SNS’s provides several opportunities for this type of serendipitous consumption. American studies report that millennials are regularly
keeping up with news and information when online, and that incidental consumption is frequent and widespread amongst online news users, regardless
of age. Frequent news consumption does not necessarily take place because of a huge interest for news but because the news show up in their social media
flow, as a by-product of their online activity. The conducted study aims at finding out how news in SNS flows are perceived and used, and what role friends
and followers in those networks play for use and interpretation. In the news context of SNS’s, we also capture incidental news consumption and its role
in the SNS flow. The presented project combines quantitative data on use of news in social media with qualitative interviews for in-depth understanding
of the use of social media in young people’s news consumption and the role of others in the news selection process. National, representative survey data
confirms previous studies on SNS’s as a widely spread news source. The interview study is conducted during March 2016 and highlights young people’s use
of social media for news consumtion, how they reflect on news in their flow and the role of opinion leaders in this context.