- Ran, W, Yamamoto, M, Xu, S 2016, ‘Media multitasking during political news consumption: A relationship with factual and subjective political knowledge’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 56, pp. 352 – 359
This article presents the outcomes of a study identifying the effects of media multitasking during political news consumption and how it translates into one’s perceived knowledge of political agenda’s versus their factual political knowledge.
The study conducted by Ran, Yamamoto and Xu applies the existent findings that “performing more than one tasks at a time, particularly complex tasks that involve careful attention, reduces the productivity of a primary task” to a political context (2016: p352). This helps in thoroughly grounding the research. It ultimately investigates how well people engage with news when dividing their attention across multiple sources.
For the purpose of the study, ‘multitasking’ is identified as a general grouping of undertaking two or more tasks requiring a certain amount of cognitive attention. Examples include listening to music whilst reading, watching or listening to political news (pairwise multitasking), and engaging in political news as a primary task whilst giving attention to two or more other media activities such as texting, watching TV, social networking, etc (bundled multitasking).
The results identify a negative relationship between media multitasking and political learning. In other words “those who engage in more than one media activity during news consumption learn less from news media and therefore have lower levels of factual political knowledge” (2016: p357). These results are backed up with statistical evidence conducted over two distinct tests.
This study provides empirical evidence for our interest in slow media. Our ability to access multiple platforms of media at once detracts from our ability to consume, interpret and effectively understand information at a high level. Current technology allows us to rapidly consume huge amounts of information at a level that may not be so productive or effective.
– Gabe