Meeting the Challenge of Measuring Communication Exposure in the Digital Age

This article offers two predictions about less and more promising ways to move forward in efforts to measure communication exposure in the digital age. First, I argue that people will be increasingly unable to recall and accurately report on the source of their information exposure in surveys, although they have never been very good at this to begin with. Many surveys seeking to gauge media processes and effects continue to assume respondents' abilities to identify and recall the precise source of information exposure, but the speed, dynamism and participatory nature of media diffusion in the digital age will render these recollections less meaningful than ever before. Second, I suggest that researchers should consider making more effective use of time as a critical source of variation in efforts to gauge communication exposure moving forward. Specifically, research designs that are able to accurately capture large-scale changes in the availability of specific media messages over time, and link this variation to repeated observations of individual attitudes and behavior, should be well positioned to study media effects and processes in the digital age.