News Usage Practices of Pakistani University Students in the Networked Media Environment

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the News Usage practices of young Pakistani university students in the networked news media environment. The development of internet and its subsequent technologies have played a significant role in the transition from Mass Media towards Networked Media and this transition has directly influenced news usage practices. In Pakistan, almost 99% of the sample population of this research has mobile phones. The introduction of 3G and 4G mobile technologies in 2014 and recent ICT policy initiatives suggests that there are plans to subsidize smart phones in the country, which will further boost the digital environment. The news users in Pakistan now have more choices to follow news from multiple platforms and via multiple devices. There is a networked media ecosystem around users and it is continuously evolving and consequently transforming the news media institutions and the users’ news usage experience. The practice of using news is changing and transforming the user’s news usage experience but the available theoretical framework did not adequately address this, until the emergence of the ‘Theory of Mediatization’. The four main contributors to mediatization theory have been Lundby (2014) Hepp (2009), Hjarvard, (2008), Couldry (2008) and Krotz (2007) .Building on their contribution, and including the valuable addition by Winfried Schulz (2004), I am applying the framework of mediatization to a cohort of university students in Pakistan to investigate their changing news usage practices in the networked media environment. I have adopted a mixed method approach, following the double sequential loops method.