What Influences People to Broaden Their Horizons?

Abstract

Personalization, including both self-selected and pre-selected, is inevitable when tremendous amounts of media content are available. Since personalization, which is believed to encourage people to consume fewer diverse contents, can lead to fragmentation and polarization in society, exposing people to more diverse contents is important. In this paper, we investigate using web TV data what behavioral and environmental features influence users to consume more diverse contents. We tackle this problem by building a classification model that predicts whether users will consume contents that are comprised of more diverse sources and features. We measure the change of the consumed content diversity of users with the method in our previous work and design six features based on our basic research and previous studies. The result of our experiment shows that our model predicts with high accuracy the change of the consumed content diversity of users, which means that the increase of the diversity of the consumed content of users is explained well with our six features. Our analysis of the model shows that consuming contents across multiple genres and inadvertent exposure to various contents positively affect users and encourage them broaden their horizons. The former has especially strong influence. In addition, we demonstrate that active-seeking behaviors of users and the amount of content in their most interested areas negatively affect the increase of their consumed content diversity. Our findings in this study are expected to be applied to web media to moderate the effect of selective exposure and reduce fragmentation and polarization in society.