DigiKomm 2026
Utopias and dystopias of the digital society:
30 years of research on computer-mediated communication
September 16–18, 2026, Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin, Germany
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Session 04 (EN): How Users and Affordances Shape the Uses of Digital Platforms Location: Main hall Session Chair: Merja Mahrt | |
    | |
Personal or Popular? Identity-Importance Impacts on Interaction with a VoD Platform 1: Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; 2: Universität Zürich; 3: Ohio State University Recommender systems increasingly mediate content exposure, yet little is known about how users' identity importance shape engagement with personalised versus popular content. Drawing on the SESAM model (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015) and Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), it was predicted that dispositional and situational, induced via social exclusion, salience of social versus personal identity would drive prederence for trending over personalised content. In an online experiment (N = 209, UK, ages 18-35), participants were randomly assigned to social exclusion or inclusion conditions via the Cyberball paradigm before browsing ClipTube, a simulated YouTube-like platform featuring trending and personalised content labels. The study revealed a significant main effect of personal identity importance on overall video selection (F(1, 194) = 6.80, p = .010), but no support for the hypothesised effects of social identity importance or exclusion condition. Implications for identity-driven selective exposure on VoD platform design are discussed | |
