Second Screening: Good or Bad for Democracy?
Second screening, a phenomenon which refers to individuals using a digital device (smartphone, laptop, etc.) while watching television in order to access the Internet/social media to obtain more information about or discuss the show they’re watching, may have significant effects on the political process.
Second screening is considered by some to be a new form of political participation as it has been found to be correlated with increased levels of political expression on social media as well as offline political participation. However, there are variances globally in this motivation. For example, individuals in Turkey, China, and Brazil reportedly engaged in second screening as an additional information mechanism, believed to be partially due to a less trustworthy and ethical journalistic media in those countries (Zúñiga & Liu, 2017). In general, online, individuals are likely to be motivated to engage in this behavior either to learn contextual information or discuss current events (e.g. presidential debate) with other people online. Offline, second screening has been linked to an increased willingness to participate in protests, political rallies, and donating money to campaigns.
That being said, findings do not indicate second screening has an effect on voting behaviors (Zúñiga & Liu, 2017). Additionally, political participation induced by second screening may be affected by individuals’ support (or lack thereof) for a candidate (McGregor & Mourão, 2015). The research on this is still relatively limited, however, so it remains to be seen.
Younger people are much more likely to engage in this behavior than are older individuals (Zúñiga et al., 2015; Zúñiga & Liu, 2017), which is not entirely surprising behaviorally, but it is interesting in the context of news-related information as older people tend to be more politically engaged. Perhaps second screening, however limited its effects may be on voting behaviors, offers a path for younger generations to dip their toes in the political waters and have their voices heard.
While second screening certainly has its positives — engaging younger people in politics, providing contextual information to important events, and generally allowing people to connect socially — there are some indications of possible downsides. Media multitasking has been found to lead to a more local perceptual processing style, meaning that individuals are not thinking about information abstractly but rather concretely. Essentially, as Kazakov et al. (2015) put it, media multitasking represents a context “where viewers rely on heuristic, automatic processing, which decreases critical evaluation of the persuasive message,” (p. 445).
So, for those people who are second screening during a political debate, although they may be participating in online conversations related to the event, they may also be causing a self-inflicting wound: an inability to think abstractly about the larger picture of a specific policy being discussed.
Alas, we find ourselves in yet another catch-22. If second screening leads to more political participation, one could argue that it is inherently good for society. But, if that second screening prevents the same people from being able to think abstractly and they instead process information based on heuristic cues (likely leading to more polarization), can we really say that’s great for democracy?
