Shiriaeva, Olga S.

Relevance. Modern society creates the image of a successful person as actively interacting with different information flows, including an impressive stream of news content. This paper assumes that there is a personal need for tracking and spreading news that develops in the interaction between a person and digital world. The individual level of this need could explain the interaction with information (its critical and uncritical dissemination) and the subjective experience of its redundancy and inaccuracy, including those experiences and actions in a pandemic situation. 

The aim of the study was to reveal the relationship of the subjective need for news with personal values, beliefs about technologies (“technophilia”) and the dissemination of news about the pandemic. 

Method. 270 people (aged 18 to 61) filled out The short (Schwartz) Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), Beliefs about New Technologies Questionnaire, Monitoring of Information about Coronavirus Scale as well as items on the subjective need for receiving and disseminating news, readiness for critical and non-critical dissemination of news about pandemics, subjective experiences of redundancy and distrust of pandemic-related information. 

Results. According to the results, the Need for News Scale allows assessing the subjective importance of receiving news and discussing them with other people and is characterized by sufficient consistency and factor validity. The need for regular news is more pronounced among men, older people, people with higher education, married people, people who have children, while the need to discuss news is not related to sociodemographic factors. For people who are more prone to technophilia it is more important to regularly receive and discuss news information with others, which, in turn, mediates the relationship between technophilia and monitoring news about coronavirus. The need for news dissemination mediates the relationship between technophilia and readiness for critical and non-critical dissemination of information about the pandemic.

Acknowledgement: The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project No 18-18-00365 "Digital socialization of cultural-historical perspective: intragenerational and intergenerational analysis".