Scholars, journalists, and other commentators argue that many parts of the world, including the US, are suffering a social-epistemological crisis, sometimes called "post-truth," and that this crisis is related to the fragmentation of newsmedia. The conventional media effects research explanation for this relationship between news and "post-truth" is framed in terms of messages and information-especially misinformation-as the mechanism by which communication effects change. Analysing the results of a large (n = 164) interview study on mobile and other digital news audiencehood, this article presents an alternative, complementary explanation focused on ritual functions of communication. The primary method of affinity analysis of interview data identified a number of recurring themes: people's preferences, methods, and patterns of news consumption exhibit wild diversity beyond easy summary, but they share the experience of news as nearly ubiquitous, and often as excessive and therefore in need of management. Strategies for managing news broadly fell into categories of news avoidance and active research. Perhaps the most consistent observation across participants' accounts, however, is a conspicuous absence of other people, with news managed and confronted alone. Those findings are interpreted through James Carey's ritual theory of communication, which argues that meaning emerges not only through transmission of messages and information, but also through people's shared experiences of participating in the ritual processes of communication. This work makes a parallel argument that media fragmentation has been implicated in social-epistemological breakdown not only through the mechanism of messages and (mis)information, but also through the transformation and, in certain cases, loss of shared news rituals. The combination of large-scale interview research with media ritual analysis led to these insights about the cultural relevance and collective implications of people's experiences of ubiquitous news and the avoidance thereof.

In this multiple case study of two high schools in the USA, we use interview and focus group data to examine the experiences of teen-age students when they friend and interact with teachers, high school administrators, parents, and other adults on social network sites (SNS). We identify several types of teen-adult interactions on SNS, including finding information, community building, and mentoring online skills, and we connect these findings to literature on homophily and context collapse. We also report on social media norms and policies of the schools where our fieldwork was conducted. We discuss how organizational policies surrounding social media use can inhibit or reinforce the development of age-homophilous networks and thereby encourage or reduce opportunities for teen-adult interaction online. Finally, we conclude that boundary work associated with managing these complex social experiences, though awkward at times, can be an important learning experience for adults and young people alike.

The majority of American teens use social network sites (SNSs) but little is known about how they leverage their online social networks to find information. As part of a larger study on social media and information behaviors, we surveyed 158 high school students to learn about their online question asking and answering practices. We describe which teens are most likely to ask and answer questions, what they ask about, on which sites they ask questions, and how useful they perceive SNSs to be as information sources. When possible, we draw comparisons with findings in the literature about adult populations. We contextualize these findings using early insights from interviews and focus groups with 80 teens and discuss how perceptions of audience, privacy concerns, and self-presentation all play a role in teens' use of SNSs to ask and answer questions.