Archive / Volume 11, Issue 2, April 2021

Online News Addiction: Future Anxiety, Fear of Missing Out on News, and Interpersonal Trust Contribute to Excessive Online News Consumption

Reza Shabahang 1 * , Mara S. Aruguete 2, Hyejin Shim 3

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Abstract

Following online news and updates have become an ever-increasing part of life in the information age. Surprisingly, however, there is no standardized measurement to examine excessive news consumption in the online context. This study was conducted in order to address online news addiction by developing and validating a questionnaire. Furthermore, this study investigated psychological determinants and consequences of online news addiction. A 9-item questionnaire was developed to assess participants’ maladaptive online news consumption. Exploratory factor analysis suggested a one-factor model including 9 items, accounting for 51.47 of the total variance. The confirmatory factor analysis showed support for this one-factor model. The results revealed that the online news addiction questionnaire had acceptable internal consistency reliability. Future anxiety, fear of missing out on news, and interpersonal trust were associated with online news addiction. High future anxiety and fear of missing out on news predicted the tendency to consume news excessively. Contrarily, those with high interpersonal trust expressed lower online news addiction. Additionally, online news addiction was a significant predictor of problematic internet use. These findings increase knowledge of online news addiction and indicate that online news consumption can be viewed as potential addictive behavior that may contribute to problematic internet use.

Keywords

online news online news consumption future anxiety fear of missing out interpersonal trust problematic internet use

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/10822

Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, Volume 11, Issue 2, April 2021, Article No: e202105

Published Online: 03 Apr 2021

Article Views: 99

Article Downloads: 50

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