Attending the news : A grounded theory about a daily regimen
Vivian B. Martin
Journalism 2008 9: 76
DOI: 10.1177/1464884907084341
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Abstract
This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of purposive attending proposes a feedback loop in which awareness increases relevance, which can increase attending, which can then reset awareness.
This article focuses on two aspects of the broader theory: the ambivalence surrounding everyday news-attending and the role cultural identities such as gender and race might play in heightening that ambivalence.
The work, influenced by Carey's call to treat news-attending in a ritual context, demonstrates how news-as-ritual and news-as-information-acquisition exist in daily tension. The work was developed using classic grounded theory methodology, which outlines protocols for building theory from data, which included interviews, participant observation with a book discussion group, and qualitative document analysis of news discussions in selected internet communities, letters to the editor, news articles, and industry reports.
Conclusion
News-attending is a daily regimen even as elements of the regimen are so habitual they go unrecognized. The linked propositions offered in this article explain how awareness shapes constructions of relevance, in turn shaping attending, which can reshape awareness. This feedback loop captures an experience that can be highly problematic as people seek to manage news as an ongoing concern. This article focuses on the ambivalence with which people approach the everyday ritual, simultaneously embracing and pulling away from news.
Vivian B. Martin
Journalism 2008 9: 76
DOI: 10.1177/1464884907084341
Abstract
This article proposes a theory about how people negotiate news as a daily regimen. The theory of purposive attending proposes a feedback loop in which awareness increases relevance, which can increase attending, which can then reset awareness.
This article focuses on two aspects of the broader theory: the ambivalence surrounding everyday news-attending and the role cultural identities such as gender and race might play in heightening that ambivalence.
The work, influenced by Carey's call to treat news-attending in a ritual context, demonstrates how news-as-ritual and news-as-information-acquisition exist in daily tension. The work was developed using classic grounded theory methodology, which outlines protocols for building theory from data, which included interviews, participant observation with a book discussion group, and qualitative document analysis of news discussions in selected internet communities, letters to the editor, news articles, and industry reports.
Conclusion
News-attending is a daily regimen even as elements of the regimen are so habitual they go unrecognized. The linked propositions offered in this article explain how awareness shapes constructions of relevance, in turn shaping attending, which can reshape awareness. This feedback loop captures an experience that can be highly problematic as people seek to manage news as an ongoing concern. This article focuses on the ambivalence with which people approach the everyday ritual, simultaneously embracing and pulling away from news.
Any number of reasons drive the ambivalence; however, the discussion outlined here highlights the role of cultural identity, particularly gender and race, in contributing to the sense that news media, in addition to offering enjoyment, injects a sense of affront into the overall texture of news-attending. The discussion of race especially highlights the feeling of marginalization and false testimony that members of minority groups experience even as they find other aspects of media to enjoy. The discounting awareness with which African-Americans attended mainstream media accounts they felt misrepresented blacks is a heightened example of how people in general work around news media in everyday life. People seek to connect to certain aspects of news media while also attempting to avoid what they perceive as media imposition.
Carey's argument for understanding activities such as news-attending in the context of ritualistic behavior is useful for situating the propositions outlined in this article. However, the ambivalence surrounding news-attending begins to indicate the tensions between ritual and transmission experiences of the news. People attend within a ritualized context in which the Overall form, order, and tone', to quote Carey's essay (1992[1975]: 21), is often contested. Many people are not looking to be saluted as 'American patriots' (p. 20) when they face inequalities and feel discriminated in their everyday lives. Letters to the editor, interviews, and other data showed attendees trying to cut through the ritualized aspects of news presentations to get to information (albeit sometimes information mirroring their worldviews).
A limitation of the study presented here is that while the exploratory grounded theory strategy allowed a vantage point from which to view people attending in a multimedia world in which they switch back and forth between consuming the serious and the light, the work is not designed to answer focused questions about the consequences of such news-attending. The subfield of qualitative audience studies could benefit from dedicated studies, some longitudinal, that focus on small groups of people reading, viewing, talking about, and acting on the news. Moreover, an examination of the social network of one small group of people would address the questions of cultural context more deeply, as well as better track the awareness-relevance-attending loop proposed in this article. Such projects could move journalism researchers and practitioners closer to understanding how people live with a regimen that shapes and is shaped by everyday life.
NOTES (ed GGA)
Much news acts as wallpaper in everyday life, attended inadvertently. Purposive attending explains the processes through which some news rises beyond this inadvertent relationship, becoming part of people's lives, and also addresses how people consciously disattend some news.
This article necessarily deals with limited aspects of the larger theory of purposive attending (Martin, 2004).
Rather than focusing on news-attending as an activity of 'information acquisition', Carey proposed seeing news-attending more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.
News reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one.
Carey's argument for understanding activities such as news-attending in the context of ritualistic behavior is useful for situating the propositions outlined in this article. However, the ambivalence surrounding news-attending begins to indicate the tensions between ritual and transmission experiences of the news. People attend within a ritualized context in which the Overall form, order, and tone', to quote Carey's essay (1992[1975]: 21), is often contested. Many people are not looking to be saluted as 'American patriots' (p. 20) when they face inequalities and feel discriminated in their everyday lives. Letters to the editor, interviews, and other data showed attendees trying to cut through the ritualized aspects of news presentations to get to information (albeit sometimes information mirroring their worldviews).
A limitation of the study presented here is that while the exploratory grounded theory strategy allowed a vantage point from which to view people attending in a multimedia world in which they switch back and forth between consuming the serious and the light, the work is not designed to answer focused questions about the consequences of such news-attending. The subfield of qualitative audience studies could benefit from dedicated studies, some longitudinal, that focus on small groups of people reading, viewing, talking about, and acting on the news. Moreover, an examination of the social network of one small group of people would address the questions of cultural context more deeply, as well as better track the awareness-relevance-attending loop proposed in this article. Such projects could move journalism researchers and practitioners closer to understanding how people live with a regimen that shapes and is shaped by everyday life.
NOTES (ed GGA)
Much news acts as wallpaper in everyday life, attended inadvertently. Purposive attending explains the processes through which some news rises beyond this inadvertent relationship, becoming part of people's lives, and also addresses how people consciously disattend some news.
This article necessarily deals with limited aspects of the larger theory of purposive attending (Martin, 2004).
Rather than focusing on news-attending as an activity of 'information acquisition', Carey proposed seeing news-attending more as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.
News reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one.
What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world.
Moreover, as readers make their way through the paper, they engage in a continual shift of roles or of dramatic forces. (Carey, 1992[1975]: 20-1)
This study shows how the information-acquisition mode, the so-called transmission view of communication, and the ritual aspects of news-attending addressed by Carey exist in tension as part of the daily regimen, contributing to some of the ambivalence of living with the news in everyday life.
People enjoy living vicariously through the dramas paraded by them; however, concerns with representation, distrust of news media as a profit-making institution and ideological apparatus, as well as the insidiousness of news media, make living with the news as a daily regimen more problematic than any one research tradition could capture on its own.
Grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1992,1998, 2003, 2005) called for an open-ended design that followed the contours of the data and protocols for analysis - coding, constant comparison of incidents, memo-writing -and helped answer the challenge, as articulated by Jensen (2000: 12), of studying media, audiences, and context without getting consumed and distracted by all the possible data in the everyday context.
This study shows how the information-acquisition mode, the so-called transmission view of communication, and the ritual aspects of news-attending addressed by Carey exist in tension as part of the daily regimen, contributing to some of the ambivalence of living with the news in everyday life.
People enjoy living vicariously through the dramas paraded by them; however, concerns with representation, distrust of news media as a profit-making institution and ideological apparatus, as well as the insidiousness of news media, make living with the news as a daily regimen more problematic than any one research tradition could capture on its own.
Grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1992,1998, 2003, 2005) called for an open-ended design that followed the contours of the data and protocols for analysis - coding, constant comparison of incidents, memo-writing -and helped answer the challenge, as articulated by Jensen (2000: 12), of studying media, audiences, and context without getting consumed and distracted by all the possible data in the everyday context.
Developed to build theory from data rather than utilizing existing theory as a starting point, grounded theory methodology has moved from its host field of sociology to fields such as nursing research and health studies, organizations and information studies, spawning variants (Benoliel, 1996; Goulding, (2002) and disagreements about the method (see Glaser's 1992 critique of Strauss and Corbin, 1990). This study utilized classic grounded theory as prescribed by Glaser (1998, 2003). Grounded theory in its purest form involves the identification of a Core concept - in this case attending - through which the other categories and related properties are integrated
Many of the elements Berelson uncovered about the relationship with the newspaper in 1949 were apparent during my fieldwork in 2001-3. Nevertheless, a vastly different media landscape, and possibly the fragility of reading as a social practice in the electronic age, complicate the relationship with the newspaper and other news media, requiring different methodologies and theorizing.
Method
The data used to develop the theory of purposive attending included:
Many of the elements Berelson uncovered about the relationship with the newspaper in 1949 were apparent during my fieldwork in 2001-3. Nevertheless, a vastly different media landscape, and possibly the fragility of reading as a social practice in the electronic age, complicate the relationship with the newspaper and other news media, requiring different methodologies and theorizing.
Method
The data used to develop the theory of purposive attending included:
1.interviews with 86 people, aged 25 to 80; 62 of the people were interviewed face-to-face, and 47 of them in interviews averaging 90 minutes in-depth (the in-depth interviews are evenly divided between men and women, most of them Connecticut residents);
2.document analysis of internet discussion groups around various news events, news articles, surveys and industry reports, letters to the editor, informal letters and emails readers sent to writers and editors, college student essays;
3.informal communication to clarify points with news professionals.
News as a daily regimen
The subsequent discussion in this article highlights some of the properties of attending, explicating how the awareness-relevance-attending loop works in everyday life, using the discussion of how awareness shaped by race and gender problematizes the daily relationship to illustrate the ambivalence in the daily regimen that was evident in people from all backgrounds, though in differing degrees. Purposive attending is a series of interlocking processes, drawing some inspiration from Giddens' (1984) structuration theory and its structure-agency feedback loop, as well as microsociologies concerned with interactions such as symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology, and work within cultural sociology on symbolic boundaries (Lamont, 2000a, 2000b). In its full explication (Martin, 2004), the theory has a series of key and ancillary propositions and outlines four phases of attending: inadvertent, direct, monitorial, and riveted. In each phase, heightened awareness opens the door to increased relevance assessment, which in turn can shape attending behaviors.
This article integrates aspects of five of the key propositions:
1.People attend to news following a regimen that is alterable by life changes or major world events but remains constant for stretches of time.
2.People attend amid ambivalence and as a result adopt strategies to negotiate media representations. The ambivalence is a result of structural and social psychological factors.
3.Increased awareness increases relevance, and in turn can increase attending for specific news items.
4.Attending can recalibrate awareness, creating a loop of awareness-relevance-attending.
5.Relevance construction shows the most variation around awareness that arises out of group identities, ideologies and experiences.
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