Digital News and the Consumption of Political Information

The Internet has fundamentally changed how people access and use news. As Dutton and others (Chapter 13, this volume) note, there are concerns that the Internet leads us to get stuck in “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles”—limiting our access to points of view that might challenge our preexisting beliefs. This chapter introduces a network approach to analyzing news consumption in the digital age. The authors explain how we can compare patterns of news consumption across demographic groups, countries, and digital platforms, and determine if there are differences across groups of users and media systems. Measuring news consumption has long been difficult owing to the limitations of self-reported data, so this chapter is notable in offering a novel approach that leverages the digital traces that people leave behind when navigating the Web.