Online media consumption in Germany: The role of political information: An analysis of German mass communication online

Abstract

Fragmented, thus, widely scattered, non-overlapping media-consumption patterns often are seen as a logical consequence of increasing numbers in online offerings, specialization and personalization, undermining a media-mediated common ground sufficient for democracy. Empirical evidence yet is missing maybe resulting from data lacking granularity in online-media consumption measured as aggregated online media offerings not detailing the level of single entities (subpages of a website). Using social network analysis and the theoretical framework of news reading publics, this article exploratively analyses patterns of online-media consumption for ~4,000 single entities of commercially-driven, German websites and 339,423 people. A new methodological approach measuring overlapping media-consumption patterns accounting for individual online-media repertoires is suggested. Using community detection, two thematically driven online-groupings of overlapping audiences characterized by using/not using political- and digital-online-media offerings are identified. However, a total fragmentation in online-media patterns is missing: 43 percent of users observed are part of both news reading publics detected.