Incidental News: How Young People Consume News on Social Media

This paper examines the dynamics of news consumption on social media through sixteen openended interviews with young users from Argentina. It adopts a texto-material perspective to explore the role of technology and users’ motivations, actions and interpretations. The interviews reveal that the idealtypical mode in which young users consume news on social media can be characterized with the notion of “incidental news”: most young users get the news on their mobile devices as part of their constant connection to media platforms; they encounter the news all the time, rather than looking for it; but click on them only sporadically and spend little time engaging with the content. Thus, the news becomes undifferentiated from the rest of the social and entertainment information. This mode of news access marks a significant discontinuity with the consumption of news on other media. It also raises major editorial and political implications.