ABSTRACT
Mass communication research as a scholarly endeavor came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, fueled by an interest in the uses and effects of newspapers and television, the two dominant media of the time. It is little wonder then that most concepts in the literature are explicated and theorized in a manner that reflects the traditional media-effects paradigm of a powerful, centralized medium received by a generally passive audience. Scholars tend to characterize media offerings in terms of content (e.g., news vs. entertainment, national vs. local news) and audience activity in terms of usage. The latter has been particularly keenly explicated, with researchers differentiating between “exposure” and “attention” (McLeod & Pan, 2005) en route to devising sophisticated measures for capturing audience members' engagement with public affairs information in the media (Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986).
