Influence of Selective Exposure to Viewing Contents Diversity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework and metric to analyze how content diversity in media consumption evolves over time, revealing that users tend to consume more diverse content autonomously and that ambiguity in content encourages diversity.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel framework and metric for measuring content diversity and investigates factors influencing diversity in media consumption behaviors.

Findings

Users consume more diverse content over time without external influence.

Highly ambiguous content correlates with increased content diversity.

Micro-level consumption is limited, but macro-level diversity increases autonomously.

Abstract

Personalization, including both self-selected and pre-selected, is inevitable when tremendous amounts of media content are available. Personalization, which is believed to cause people to consume fewer diverse contents, can lead to fragmentation and polarization in society. Therefore, it is important to investigate the diversity of consumed contents over time. In this paper, first, we propose a framework to measure and analyze how the diversity of the consumed contents of users changes over time. In our framework, we introduce a new metric to measure content diversity based on our redefinition of diversity. Then, we investigate the relationship between selective exposure and content diversity changes using our framework and examine what factors encourage people to consume contents that are more diverse. We find that people autonomously consume more diverse contents from a macro-perspective without an external influence, suggesting that people are less likely to be fragmented and polarized, although from a micro-perspective they consume limited contents. We also obtain evidence that users who consume highly ambiguous contents tend to increase the diversity of their consumed contents.