Pablo J. Boczkowski

Eugenia Mitchelstein

Understanding digital technology in daily life: why we should think holistically in terms of a digital environment instead of discrete devices and apps. Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.

How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now

The Digital Environment

Los sitios web de las grandes organizaciones mediáticas -CNN, El País, Clarín, La Nación, USA Today, The Guardian y otras- suministran al público gran parte de las noticias online que este consume. Pero aunque una gran proporción de las principales notas difundidas por estos sitios se ocupan de la política, las relaciones internacionales y la economía, los usuarios (tal como lo evidencian los artículos más vistos) muestran una preferencia por las noticias deportivas, policiales, de ocio y espectáculos y del estado del tiempo. En este libro, Pablo J. Boczkowski y Eugenia Mitchelstein examinan la divergencia en las preferencias y consideran sus implicaciones para la industria de los medios y la vida democrática en la era digital.

La divergencia entre las preferencias informativas de los medios y el público

La brecha de las noticias

An analysis of divergent online news preferences of journalists and consumers and what this means for media and democracy in the digital age. The websites of major media organizations—CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others—provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine the divergence in preferences and consider its implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age. Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture, and that it is not affected by innovations in forms of storytelling, such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Drawing upon these findings, they explore the news gap's troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.

Eugenia Mitchelstein

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