Harsh Taneja

Media consumption across platforms: Identifying user-defined repertoires:

New media have made available a wide range of platforms and content choices. However, audiences cope with abundant choices by using more narrowly defined repertoires. Unfortunately, we know little of how users create repertoires across media platforms. This study uses factor analysis to identify user-defined repertoires from data obtained by following 495 users throughout an entire day. Results indicate the presence of four repertoires that are powerfully tied to the rhythms of people’s daily lives. These were in turn explained by a combination of factors such as audience availability and individual demographics.

Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage With Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior

The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain Web users’ choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and that access blockage matters only when such sites are blocked. We examine the case of China, where online blockage is notoriously comprehensive, and compare Chinese Web usage patterns with those elsewhere. Analyzing audience traffic among the 1000 most visited websites, we find that websites cluster according to language and geography. Chinese websites constitute one cluster, which resembles other such geolinguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and its degree of isolation. Our sociological investigation reveals a greater role of cultural proximity than access blockage in explaining online behaviors.

Measuring Media Use Across Platforms: Evolving Audience Information Systems

Audience measurement worldwide is responding to the need to measure media consumption across platforms. One approach being employed by the industry is “single source” audience information systems that measure usage across media and purchase behavior from the same set of respondents. This study evaluates the readiness of such systems to meet the current challenges in measuring audiences by analyzing single source systems from five diverse media markets. The analysis reveals that these systems capture dimensions of audience behavior other than exposure—an enhancement over traditional audience information systems. However, their usage in the marketplace suggests that single source data complement existing mono media systems than serve as alternate currencies.

How Do Global Audiences Take Shape? The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use

This study investigates the role of both cultural and technological factors in determining audience formation on a global scale. It integrates theories of media choice with theories of global cultural consumption and tests them by analyzing shared audience traffic between the worlds 1,000 most popular websites. We find that language and geographic similarities are more powerful predictors of audience overlap than hyperlinks and genre similarity, highlighting the role of cultural structures in shaping global media use.

Mapping an audience-centric World Wide Web: A departure from hyperlink analysis

This article argues that maps of the Web’s structure based solely on technical infrastructure such as hyperlinks may bear little resemblance to maps based on Web usage, as cultural factors drive the latter to a larger extent. To test this thesis, the study constructs two network maps of 1000 globally most popular Web domains, one based on hyperlinks and the other using an “audience-centric” approach with ties based on shared audience traffic between these domains. Analyses of the two networks reveal that unlike the centralized structure of the hyperlink network with few dominant “core” Websites, the audience network is more decentralized and clustered to a larger extent along geo-linguistic lines.

Reimagining Internet Geographies: A User-Centric Ethnological Mapping of the World Wide Web

We propose a new user-centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces, in contrast to existing imageries that prioritize Internet infrastructure. We construct ethnological maps of WWW usage through a network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular websites at 3 time points and develop granular measures for exploring global participation in online communication. Our results reveal the significant growth and thickening of online regional cultures associated with the global South. We draw attention to how local cultural identity, affirmative state intervention and economic contexts shape regional cultures on the global WWW.

Rethinking the generational gap in online news use: An infrastructural perspective

Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of shared usage obtained from passively metered usage data across a vast range of online news outlets for millennials and boomers. We compare each cohort’s usage networks comprising various types of news websites. Our analyses reveal a smaller than commonly assumed generational gap in online news usage, with characteristics that manifest the multifarious effects of the infrastructures of the media environment, alongside those of preferences.

Using Commercial Audience Measurement Data in Academic Research

ABSTRACT Surveys, although widely used to measure media exposure, are blunt instruments. In today’s complex media environments it is difficult to accurately recall usage. Audience measurement data, often collected by the media industries for commercial purposes, offer an alternative. However, unlike surveys, where individuals are the unit of analysis, audience measurement companies report data aggregated at the level of media outlets. Despite this limitation, audience measurement data may be analyzed for deciphering media use patterns in theoretically productive ways.

Audience Measurement and Media Fragmentation: Revisiting the Monopoly Question

Many studies have examined contests between audience measurement systems in media markets. These suggest that the audience measurement industry is a natural monopoly. This study revisits the question with a novel approach by investigating a market at a time when two measurement services provided data. Executives were interviewed in the Indian television market on how they used information available from two competing ratings services. Although market participants recognized only one system (TAM, which provided weekly ratings) as the currency for trading advertising time, many used the second system (aMAP, an overnight ratings service) selectively for improving network performance. Therefore, fragmented markets can support multiple systems if they serve distinct institutional interests.

The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption

In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election, we indeed find the fake news audience comprises a small, disloyal group of heavy Internet users. We also find that social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news. With this revised understanding, we revisit the democratic implications of the fake news crisis.