News From the Background to the Foreground
Jordan Wirfs-Brock, Katie Quehl · Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies · 2019
People are the designers and curators of their own news and information ecosystems, due to the disruption of the news industry and developments in media technology. To understand how people use technology to manage their news consumption, we conducted a two-week diary study with 14 participants, focusing on how people transition between news content and behaviors via different media, sources, platforms and devices. We used an inductive, qualitative analysis of the diary study data to analyze the news behaviors and their underlying motivations and found that people frequently shift their focus between ambient background news streams and active foreground news behaviors. Although people often passively consume news content as a background activity, they also actively manage background news habits to increase the chances of relevant foreground experiences. People manage news consumption by developing routines that are often supported by technology use and social interactions. We encourage product designers to treat backgrounding as an essential part of news consumption behavior and suggest new design directions that employ ubiquitous computing technologies---such as context sensing and routine modeling---to more effectively attend to background-to-foreground behaviors and transitions.