Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, providing digital texts as learning material had become a common practice in academia. But little is known about who profits from and who loses out when moving from ...print to digital reading in higher education. In this study, we connect digital reading to digital divides, and draw on a unique data set of university students digital reading practices obtained by a quantitative survey during the lockdown semester in three European countries. Based on the statistical results for digital reading access, attitudes, motivation, skills, behavior, and support, we argue that varying digital reading experiences of students are linked to inequalities in higher education opportunities. In conclusion, our results contrast current digital policies of merely improving access to digital texts in academia to democratize higher education.
With the increase of online journalism, embedded multimedia stories have become more popular. Yet, little is known about the cognitive and affective effects this journalistic format may have on the ...audience. This experimental study compares the effects of embedded multimedia, traditional multimedia, and text-only format on readers’ knowledge gain, emotional reactions, and narrative transportation. Overall, the effects are substantially less pronounced than expected. The audiences’ emotional reactions and narrative transportation do not depend on modality, whereas knowledge gain is slightly decreased by multimodality. The theoretical, practical, and methodological implications of these limited effects are discussed.
Religion can affect public support for the European Union (EU). However, specifying the circumstances under which religion may become a stronger predictor of EU-support has so far been neglected. ...This article shows that the media play a role in this process and it is investigated to what extent the presence or absence of references to religious issues in EU news coverage primes people's religious attitudes to contribute to their evaluation of the EU. For this purpose, a content analysis of the amount of religious news items in EU coverage in German and Dutch newspapers between 1997 and 2007 was conducted. Two points in time were chosen — 1998, when only a small amount of religious news items appeared in EU coverage, and 2005, when religious items reached a peak. Eurobarometer data were used to test the media priming proposition. The findings show that an increasing religious dimension in media coverage about the EU primes a linkage between religious and political considerations and thus influences the strength of the impact of religion on attitudes towards the EU.
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