The rise of mobile could create “a second-class digital citizenship” of less informed news consumers

Few would argue that, in theory, the sharp increase in mobile access hasn’t been a good thing for individuals and society as a whole. A more connected public is a more informed one, and increased mobile penetration means more people are able to connect more often than ever before. But according to a new report from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, there’s a dark side to the mobile revolution, which threatens to create a less engaged “second-class” citizenship of news consumers who don’t benefit from mobile adoption as much as everyone assumes.A more mobile public could, paradoxically, become a less informed one.

Johanna Dunaway, the report’s researcher and a recent fellow at Shorenstein, blames smartphones themselves. Thanks to a combination of smaller screens, slower connection speeds, and the variable costs of data, mobile devices are, in many senses, imperfect vectors for news consumption. Using eye-tracking software, Dunaway and her fellow researchers were able to monitor how people engaged with news on their phones. Their conclusion: “We found that, relative to computer users, mobile users spent less time reading news content and were less likely to notice and follow links and to do so for longer periods of time,” Dunaway said. Their findings are supported by previous data from Pew Research, which found that, while most sites now get more visitors through mobile than desktop, readers tend to spend far less time reading while on mobile devices.