Exposure Diversity

The digital environment has fundamentally changed the conditions for media diversity and for exposure diversity in particular, and has made research in this area more important than ever. Paradoxically, the digital information environment, with its abundance of information, has greatly expanded, and at the same time decreased the opportunities for citizens to encounter diverse content. Never was it possible to receive more information, not only from the traditional national media outlets, but also from a myriad of other media companies. And more than ever do citizens rely on the media but also on new institutions such as search engines, social networks and recommendation algorithms to help them filter through the rich choice of information and find and identify relevant and trustworthy information. The objective of this chapter is to identify the main structural, technological and individual challenges for exposure diversity, the state of the art of exposure diversity research so far, and the contours of a future research agenda. In particular, we stress the need for more comparative work, more research that combines normative and
empirical expertise, but also work on methodological innovation. We explain why
methodological innovations, in the form of online behavior tracking or new forms of observational computational research, can open up new and exciting avenues for answering questions that could not be studied before.