Managing media use: How young adults deal with information abundance

Abstract

This study examines how young adults manage their relationship with media in an era of information abundance. Drawing on focus groups and in-depth interviews, we analyze young adults’ media use through the lens of management, focusing on how they plan, organize, motivate themselves, and control their media use. We identify five analytically distinct domains of media management: information flows, emotions, social relationships, attention, and self-presentation. Our key finding is that young adults do not primarily manage media by device or platform, but by the functions media serve in everyday life. Participants distinguish three core functions of media use: being in the loop about major developments, maintaining connection with friends and family, and zoning out through leisure-oriented use. Being in the loop involves balancing informational and emotional needs with social and moral expectations, using ambient news awareness to remain informed of important developments without becoming emotionally overwhelmed. Maintaining connection is characterized by the proactive allocation of attention to messaging apps, which is not experienced as intrusive. In contrast, media used for zoning out are experienced as unproductive and associated with guilt and frustration over perceived loss of self-control, prompting attempts to limit their use.

Introduction

In today’s age of “information abundance” (Boczkowski, 2021), our relationship with media may best be described as what Deuze (2012) calls “media life”: we no longer live “with” media, but rather, all aspects of our lives “take place in media” (p. x, emphasis added). Among the transformations in the media landscape, the impact of social media and smartphones on young people’s lives has received particular attention, even leading to legislation targeting these platforms and devices in several countries. However, empirical evidence for detrimental effects on outcomes such as mental health remains weak or inconsistent (Masur et al., 2022; Valkenburg et al., 2022). Furthermore, scholars caution against neglecting young people’s agency in navigating both the negative and positive aspects of media use (Lebedíková et al., 2024). Whereas much of the debate – understandably – centers on adolescents, this paper instead focuses on young adults (18–24), who typically have greater autonomy and face fewer school- or parent-imposed constraints on their media use.

A rich tradition of research has explored how people negotiate the proliferation of media in their everyday lives (e.g. Livingstone, 2002; Silverstone, 1994; Ytre-Arne, 2023). Building on this body of work, this study asks: How do young adults attempt to manage their media use in an age of information abundance? We frame this question through the lens of management, inspired by Thorson and Battocchio’s (2024) notion of media users as “active builders toward an idealized personal media environment” (p. 614). Drawing on management theory, we define management as the process of coordinating one’s own media use to achieve one’s goals efficiently and effectively (Robbins and Coulter, 2018). The underlying assumption is that young adults hold conceptions of what their ideal media use should look like, and that their everyday practices involve attempts to move toward that ideal. Importantly, our focus on management is not to imply that young adults have full agency over their media use or that their behaviors are always deliberate. Rather, we contribute to research on young people and media by exploring which aspects of media use young adults themselves believe require management and the strategies they use to actively – though not necessarily successfully – navigate information abundance.

Avoiding the a priori negative connotations implicit in concepts such as “overload,” “avoidance,” “disconnection,” or “detox,” we explicitly center participants’ own descriptions of their media practices, encompassing both negative and positive experiences (cf. Boczkowski, 2021). Second, rather than focusing on specific platforms or technologies, we take a deliberately broad approach to capture young adults’ everyday media practices and experiences, in which multiple media, platforms, devices, and genres may overlap, merge, diverge, or clash (Boczkowski, 2021; Volk et al., 2025). This enables us to identify how young adults themselves differentiate between various dimensions of media use and how they (attempt to) manage them.

We conducted repeated focus groups in which participants drew and presented “media days” (Örnebring and Hellekant Rowe, 2022), visually representing how media are embedded in their everyday routines. This was followed by in-depth interviews. Combining inductive and deductive analysis, we identified five areas participants sought to manage: information flows, emotions, attention, social relationships, and self-presentation (cf. Edgerly, 2024; Thorson and Battocchio, 2024). Before presenting our findings, we review existing literature relevant to these five areas through the lens of management.

Theoretical background: Management of media use

We conceptualize the management of media use as consisting of four interrelated functions: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling (Fayol, 1949; Robbins and Coulter, 2018). Planning involves setting goals and intentions toward one’s “ideal” media use. Organizing refers to structuring media environments, routines, and tools to support these goals. Leading entails motivating oneself to pursue these intentions and maintain the aspired behaviors, including the (social) norms and values that guide them. Finally, controlling involves monitoring and adjusting media use when goals are not met.

Management of information flows

From a management perspective, managing information flows is about planning desired exposure, structuring the media environment accordingly, motivating oneself to engage with or disengage from certain information, and controlling one’s exposure and practices if needed. In the digital age, Thorson and Wells (2016: 5) define “curation” as “to select and organize, to filter abundance into a collection of manageable size, one that in its smaller shape fulfils an informational or strategic need more efficiently than the buzzing flow of all available options.” The resulting “curated flow” (Thorson and Wells, 2016) involves personal, journalistic, algorithmic, political, and social curation (see also Merten, 2021; Swart, 2023; Thorson and Battocchio, 2024; Thurman et al., 2019). Managing information flows is about both selecting and rejecting information encounters (Volk et al., 2025). In particular, news avoidance can be seen as a controlling response to perceived information overload (de Bruin et al., 2021; Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020; Toff et al., 2023).

A related phenomenon indispensable for understanding how young people manage information abundance is the “news-finds-me perception” (NFM), referring to “individuals' perceptions that a) they are well informed about current events despite not purposely following the news, because b) the important information ‘finds them’ anyway, through their general media use, peers and social connections” (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017: 106). Younger people show higher levels of NFM (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2020), in line with social media being their main gateway to news (Newman et al., 2024). Curation and NFM are not at odds: Mitchelstein et al. (2020) present “incidentality” as a continuum, with the organization of “an environment conducive to incidental news acquisition” (p. 1143) as a deliberate practice. Managing information flows is not only about controlling exposure, but also about evaluating the information encountered. Verification practices of news (Swart and Broersma, 2022; Tandoc et al., 2018) can be seen as another form of (seeking) control. In a context of low media trust and a perceived “information cacophony” (Cotter and Thorson, 2022), skepticism may become generalized (Fletcher and Nielsen, 2019), leading young adults to treat all content as equally worthy of suspicion.

Management of emotions

Managing emotions through media use involves regulating affective states by engaging with or disengaging from specific content, platforms, and practices (Katz et al., 1973; Zillmann, 1988). While this entails planning and organizing one’s personal media environment, managing emotions may be understood primarily as a form of controlling: actively monitoring and adjusting one’s emotional state. Evidence of this was seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people strategically intensified or limited their news consumption to meet different emotional needs (de Bruin et al., 2021; Groot Kormelink and Klein Gunnewiek, 2022; Ytre-Arne and Moe, 2021).

A recent debate regarding media and emotions centers on the effects of smartphone and social media usage on well-being. Haidt (2024) argues that the switch to a “phone-based childhood” led to a decline in teen mental health, and that for girls in particular, social media use not only correlates with but “causes” mental illness (pp. 10–11). However, other scholars have found these associations are weak or inconsistent (Masur et al., 2022; Valkenburg et al., 2022). Recent studies also highlight the heterogeneity and duality in these effects: social media affect people differently (Beyens et al., 2020), affect the same individual both positively and negatively (van der Wal et al., 2024a), and vary by platform, with positive or null effects for Snapchat and WhatsApp and negative effects for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok (van der Wal et al., 2024b). From a management perspective, this raises questions as to how actively young adults plan, organize, motivate themselves, and control their social media use in line with their emotional needs.

Management of attention

Confronted with endless streams of information, young adults make (implicit) decisions about how to allocate their finite attention across media. Managing attention may involve planning and organizing the time, place, frequency, and duration of media use. It also involves motivating oneself to resist certain practices (e.g. interruptions, distractions, mindless use), and controlling these practices when they clash with other goals. Scholars have explored resistance or abstinence from media, most notably through “digital disconnection” (Lomborg and Ytre-Arne, 2021) and “digital detox” (Syvertsen, 2020). Empirical studies have investigated the effects of digital detox on such outcomes as mental health (Radtke et al., 2022), as well as motivations (Nguyen et al., 2024) and strategies for disconnection (Mannell, 2019; Volk et al., 2025). Vanden Abeele et al. (2024) present a process-based framework of digital disconnection, distinguishing four motivations – time displacement, interference (interruption), boundary blurring (of social roles), and exposure (e.g. to negative content) – and linking these to four strategies for disconnection: limiting time, limiting access, limiting channels, and limiting content, contacts, and features. This framework illustrates how attention management involves aligning motivations with concrete (controlling) strategies in everyday media use.

Management of social relationships

Navigating an abundant media landscape requires managing one’s mediated relationships. This involves planning and organizing communication across platforms, motivating oneself to maintain (or break) social ties, and controlling expectations of availability and responsiveness. Mascheroni and Vincent (2016: 322) highlight how “perpetual contact” through smartphones and instant messaging apps is associated with both “feelings of proximity, intimacy, and belonging” and “feelings of anxiety and insecurity” through expectations of availability and obligations to reciprocate. Research further points to the interplay between online and offline contacts, with messaging apps affording possibilities to deepen friendships through “a shared virtual space” for chitchat as well as a space to “micro-coordinate” offline social activities (Vanden Abeele et al., 2017: 887). News also plays a role in maintaining social relationships, both positively – as fodder for conversation – and negatively, keeping up with news to avoid appearing uninformed (Boczkowski, 2021; Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015). These dynamics show that young adults manage social relationships by balancing connectivity, social ties, and social obligations across different media.

Management of self-presentation

Finally, management of self-presentation involves planning and organizing one’s online image, motivating oneself to maintain the desired image, and controlling how one is perceived. A wealth of studies has explored how users present themselves online (e.g. Boyd, 2010). In a literature review, Hollenbaugh (2021) identified three variables impacting self-presentation on social media: platform affordances (anonymity, persistence of content, visibility), other-generated contents (likes, comments, tags, etc.), and (perceived) audience composition. These findings dovetail with what Thorson and Battocchio (2024) term “visibility labor”: “substantial effort to sort audiences and architect a sense of personal safety and privacy–to be more or less visible to the right audiences” (p. 26). Participants were especially careful engaging with news and politics, which could easily “incite drama and thus shape how others see them” (p. 262).

A key concept for understanding how people manage their online image is context collapse: the flattening of multiple audiences into one, thereby blurring the lines between the different selves people typically present in different social contexts (Davis and Jurgenson, 2014; Marwick and Boyd, 2011). Litt and Hargittai (2016) found that users engage more in audience-reaching strategies (i.e. efforts to reach target audiences) than in audience-limiting strategies (i.e. efforts to exclude non-target audiences), but recent work on having multiple accounts on the same platform suggests that young people also use these spaces to explore different self-presentations among different audiences (Tao and Ellison, 2023). Overall, then, young adults manage their online image by aligning self-presentation strategies with (perceived) audience expectations and personal goals.

Method

Capturing media use in an age of “information abundance” (Boczkowski, 2021) comes with an obvious challenge: if media are so pervasive and ubiquitous that they become invisible (Deuze, 2012), how does one begin to study them? How can one get research participants to perceive, let alone meaningfully discuss, the role media play in their lives? Inspired by Örnebring and Hellekant Rowe (2022), we combined repeated focus groups with participants’ drawings of their own media use (“media day”) to help overcome this challenge.

In the first round of focus groups, participants drew a line on a A2-sized piece of paper, representing an average (week)day in their life. Next, they were asked to add all main activities they engage in (e.g. waking up, having breakfast), followed by all media they use, from devices to apps and platforms. Next, participants added all moments they encounter or seek out news. Finally, participants were asked: if you were to decide to consume more news, realistically, during which moments would you do this? Once the drawings were completed, each participant presented their drawing. The moderator (first author) and assistants (co-authors) asked clarifying questions, and participants were encouraged to interact. In the second round of focus groups 6 weeks later, participants revisited their media drawings and reflected on any changes.

Participants were recruited through the social networks of the two research assistants. They were all in the same age group: 18–24. Participants of each focus group knew each other. The groups were: (1) mixed-gender, same study program (N = 4); (2) all women, same study program (N = 5); (3) all men, student sports association (N = 5); (4) mixed-gender, cross-university “honors” program (N = 4). All focus groups took place in person, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The first round of focus groups took place in April 2022, the second round in June 2022, except for the all-men follow-up, which for organizational reasons took place in October 2022.

All focus groups were recorded and transcribed. For the analysis, we initially used an inductive approach, open coding anything related to how participants experienced media and news. However, upon encountering Thorson and Battocchio’s (2024) work on “personal platform architecture,” we found the notion of management was a useful lens through which to explore our data. The final analysis can therefore best be described as abductive: we paid attention to how our participants managed media, but stayed open to findings that did not fit with this framework. Ultimately, we arrived at five areas participants seek to manage to handle media use in an age of information abundance. To assess the robustness and validity of our findings, we tested this framework on 13 in-depth interviews with young adults (18–24) the first author conducted in 2025. Similarly focused on everyday media experiences and practices, these interviews confirmed the five areas of management we found in our 2022 data. We argue this temporal triangulation supports the credibility and stability of our findings.

Results

Management of information flows

Managing information flows entails organizing your environment in order to stay aware of main news events via more or less trusted sources. Rather than more or less actively “monitoring” or “checking” (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015) news, it is more accurate to say participants want to have updates “flow by.” This flow consists predominantly of information encountered while scrolling through their social media feeds, push notifications from news apps popping up on their phone screen, and news updates received through their social circle (parents, teachers and friends). This mix between “personal,” “journalistic,” and “social curation” (Thorson and Wells, 2016) is illustrated by Michael:

I think [news] comes to me, yeah I’m on Insta much more than on those news apps, so I think I get most news information from there, and [push] notifications from [major Dutch news media], and actually based on that I only read more if I want the information elaborated.

By 2025, news had also found its way into participants’ messaging apps. Hillary follows three news media via the WhatsApp functionality Channels, which allows for updates to be sent as one-way broadcasts: “You just get like snippets or headlines of it. So I scroll through them and if I find something interesting I click on it [. . .] I wouldn't click on something every day, that's for sure.”

While setting up this flow required action (enabling notifications, following news media), once established, effortlessness became key. This is illustrated by Ivy, who criticized the BBC app for “forcing” her to open push notifications to be able to read their content:

One thing that really annoys me is that if I get a notification from BBC, and I don’t want to open the message, but I just like wanna expand it a little so that I can read the full sentence–it doesn’t do that.

To be clear, she is not talking about having to open the BBC app, but rather the push notification itself – evidencing the frictionless experience she expects.

In line with this effortless flow, participants overwhelmingly had a news-finds-me perception (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017). A common phrase was that “if [the news] is big enough, it will reach me.” What stood out from their description is that their “awareness system” (cf. Hermida, 2010) functions as a two-way safety net: not only does it “save” them from missing potentially important news without having to actively look for it, it also protects them emotionally from having to engage with (too much) negative news. Alex illustrates both sides of this safety net:

I trust my news notifications to just pop up once something big happens. And if it’s not big enough to pop up then I don’t want to search it up because, I mean, I’m a little anxious sometimes, and I don’t wanna like think, ‘oh, are we gonna start World War three today? [. . .] . But, yeah, it still has access to me if it’s very important.

This ambient awareness (Hermida, 2010) – best described as being in the loop – is about reassurance: knowing enough to get by while minimizing cognitive effort and emotional impact. This is not to say participants never proactively consumed news: some checked news apps during their morning routine, and during the Ukraine war (2022) and the war on Gaza (2025), some participants reported actively looking for updates.

Organizing yourself to stay in the loop involves determining which messengers to rely on. Reflecting the relatively high levels of trust in news in the Netherlands (Newman et al., 2024), our participants’ implicit, taken-for-granted position is that professional news media can be trusted. Indeed, in contrast to their U.S. counterparts (Thorson and Battochio, 2024), they engage in little cognitive work to judge or verify the veracity of news they encounter. Instead, they outsource this “brainwork” to professional news media, which they trust will inform them globally of the most important news. We might say participants exhibit a “generalized trust” (Toff, 2022; cf. Fletcher and Nielsen’s (2019 “generalized scepticism”), assuming most news they encounter can be trusted. This is illustrated by Quinten, who predominantly follows the news updates his Samsung phone sends him, which he accepts uncritically: “I don’t even know what that’s called, but Samsung has this automatic news thingie, that you just get notifications about something interesting.” This generalized trust appears key to the effortless flow described earlier: participants stay ambiently aware of major news without having to actively monitor or critically evaluate it.

Participants did note to have to generally be careful on social media due to the presence of “fake news.” However, this doesn’t stop them from using social media for news, nor does it – by their own admission – translate into a critical discernment of information in general. They also saw certain international news as less reliable. Echoing the idea of an “information cacophony” (Cotter and Thorson, 2022), Emory compared US media to a “maze”:

Where it’s like, not only are you just kind of overwhelmed by the stories, but also you can’t even be completely sure that the way that the stories, like I don’t think the facts are completely misrepresented, like incorrect, but they often are misrepresented, or twisted in a way to make readers think one thing or the other.

Rather than reorganizing her curated flow of information, Emory engages in a cognitive control strategy: she filters out “opinions” to get to the “gist” of the story she judges to be “probably true.” Jordan used a similar approach, distinguishing fleeting “news opinions” from more durable “facts.” Consistent with the news-finds-me perception, she expects that important enough facts will repeatedly show up in the news, enabling her to determine what is “true” over time.

Management of emotions

Emotional management centers on navigating and mitigating the impact of negative information, while balancing moral and social expectations to stay informed. Although occasionally social media in general were mentioned – for example, by Jordan who felt bad seeing Instagram full of happy people as she was going through a stressful period – management of emotions mainly concerned (negative) news. Two emotions dominated as participants discussed the impact of news: sadness and hopelessness. Frank and Kyle recalled concrete news stories, respectively about the murder of a 9-year-old boy (“That was really really awful, that really stayed with me for a long, long time”) and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. (“that can really make me agitated the whole day or a bit down. [. . ..] how can you ever do something about this?”). By 2025, participants also mentioned the cumulative effect of what they perceived as crisis after crisis: from Covid-19 to the war in Ukraine to the war on Gaza. Shirah illustrates: “Because I see people suffering and I just can’t do anything about it. [. . .] Especially the last two, three, four years, it became so much that I was like, OK, I need to pull back.”

Despite this negative impact, participants felt an obligation to – at least somewhat – keep up with news, citing a mix of social and moral expectations. First, they felt – more or less explicit – pressure from their social circle (school, parents, friends) to do so; this will be discussed in more detail later. Second, being in the transition toward adulthood, some participants felt following news comes with the territory: “The older I get, the more I'm like, sure, it might be bad, but in order for me to understand what's going on, I need to have knowledge of that.” (Gia). Finally, participants described what might be called a noblesse oblige: being in a relatively privileged position, they felt it was their “obligation” to those less well-off to know about their predicaments:

People are actually dying [. . .] and for you it is a little inconvenient right now to read about something. That feels to me really weird. But I struggle with it a lot because it’s not very good for my mental health. (Ivy)

To deal with the tension between needing to keep up with news yet being negatively affected by it, participants engaged in strategies that can be categorized into content- and context-centered. They described four content-related strategies to deal with negative news: seeking out positive news, selective news avoidance, keeping “news free” spaces, and a “headline-only” approach. The first involved navigating to “positive” news when they visited a news app or website, or purposefully following “happy news” accounts on social media. Second, participants selectively avoided heavy topics dominating the news. A third strategy was to keep certain social media “news free.” In an exception to most participants’ awareness system in which Instagram played a central role, Anna purposefully kept it free of any news, to prevent being incidentally exposed to triggering content: “I think it's important for me that I can decide like beforehand if it's gonna make me upset or not so then if I want to read it or not.” Rather than having news find her, she seeks to actively control her exposure. Finally, participants limited engagement with negative news to reading headlines, in line with the two-way safety net the news-finds-me perception provides: reading just the headlines is enough to stay generally up-to-date, without having to engage too deeply with the actual content.

Participants also described two context-related strategies to deal with negative news. The first centered around the time of day, particularly not consuming news either in the morning or at night. Laura shared her “Is the sun up?”-heuristic:

[If] it's [. . .] just like happy and shining, I'm like “OK, it can't be too bad looking at the negative news” to be honest. [. . .] So I think in the mornings for me was just a lot better 'cause it’s just like ‘OK, it's OK, it's in the morning, it's not scary’ you know?.

Emory similarly made a distinction between “content-filled media” like news which she consumes in the morning, versus “mind-numbing media” like social media and streaming services (e.g. Netflix) before she goes to sleep. The second context-related strategy is to rely on conversation to process the news. Bodil prefers hearing negative news through her mother, serving as a shock absorber: “because probably the way she tells me it's more like delicate in a way.” Zahira instead prays and talks to Allah about heavy news: “That keeps me calm.” Notably, participants’ strategies do not aim to completely prevent negative emotions, but rather to regulate their intensity and timing. This allows them to continue to stay in the loop without becoming emotionally overloaded.

Finally, whereas it was typically exposure of news content that needed to be managed, for John, news forms an emotional escape from his real-life problems. Indeed, precisely the heavier news stories are effective for this: “Even when you just have work anxieties and then you read the news and you’re like, ‘oh my god, Ukraine’. It likes takes you away from there.”

Management of attention

Management of attention refers to participants’ ideas about and efforts to regulate the time and energy they spend on media. A key finding is that participants did not primarily distinguish between media by platform or device, but by the function they fulfilled: “connecting” versus “chilling.” Connecting is about monitoring and acting on social traffic (i.e. messages from friends, family), especially via WhatsApp, but also e-mail and Snapchat. Chilling refers to passively and leisurely consuming media content, mostly on scrollable, image- or video-centric platforms (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube). While the management of attention involves limiting time spent on “chilling,” for “connecting” it involves the exact opposite: facilitating constant access and responsiveness. This distinction is succinctly summarized by Laura: “Throughout the whole day I'll keep checking WhatsApp if any notifications come in. [. . .] I limited my time for Instagram specifically to like 10 minutes a day.”

The deeply felt urge to stay on top of social “traffic” is evidenced by how, while drawing their “media day,” participants struggled with how to add their WhatsApp use, since it spans from waking up until going to sleep. Kyle described how during (university) seminars, he actively monitors WhatsApp “to see what I’m missing,” followed by “checking everything I missed” during lunch. He disables Instagram and TikTok when he is working out, but allows WhatsApp, Snapchat and e-mails to come through, so he can monitor them in between sets. Similarly, Valerie always has a WhatsApp browser open on her laptop. Here, attention management is about ensuring “perpetual contact” (Mascheroni and Vincent, 2016), reflecting social expectations further discussed in the next section.

While social traffic is actively facilitated, management of attention for “chilling” takes the opposite form: actively limiting access and time spent on these platforms. Participants describe a range of controlling strategies for platforms like Instagram and TikTok, including setting timers, (temporarily) deleting apps, using only web browsers to reduce usability, and adding “friction” by placing these apps in a special folder on their phone. Jordan referred to this folder as “Pandora’s Box”: “I know that opening it is gonna take like too much time and effort and energy.” Participants’ key frustration is that these platforms are not experienced as worthwhile, yet are hard to resist. Whereas media for “connection” were taken for granted as part of everyday life, media for “chilling” were described in decidedly negative and even moral terms:

“During my break I’m sometimes on Instagram or Reddit, I actually often try not to do it, but sometimes it does slip through. [. . .] I actually think it’s a waste of my time, [. . .] you rarely learn anything from it, it’s just killing time, so then I prefer to play bass or call my girlfriend or something like that. That’s more useful in my opinion”. (Frank)

Participants framed media use in terms of “good” versus “bad,” with “good” media implicitly linked to productivity or self-improvement. For instance, using a news app or reading a book was described as “a good passing time.” Even within Netflix, Emory made a distinction between “useful” (arthouse films) and “mind-numbing” (re-watching comedy series) content. These moral judgments did not necessarily reflect differences in actual use. Indeed, it was exactly their use of media for “chilling” that, while enjoyable in the moment, made them feel retrospectively guilty or regretful (Costera Meijer et al., 2026). Their negative evaluations of media for “chilling” may be understood as expressions of internalized productivity norms, framing their use of chilling’ media as a personal failure of self-control – within a media environment designed to attract their attention. A notable exception, Shirah described Pinterest, dominated by aesthetic pictures rather than “addictive” 10-second videos and void of “noise” (i.e. comments, opinions), as a rare exception. Providing cognitive and emotional refuge – “It’s not political, not social. [. . .] Pinterest has never made me feel bad like TikTok has” – it is a rare space where she feels she can just be.

Management of social relations

As discussed above, managing social relationships involves facilitating perpetual availability and meeting social expectations around being informed. However, while participants are nearly always “on,” this form of relational “work” is so taken-for-granted that it barely came up as something they consciously experienced as effort. What participants did experience as social pressure was keeping up with news in order to maintain relationships, especially concerning parents, friends, and school. Penelope illustrates:

[My parents] kind of expect you to know everything that's happening in the news. And also with some friends, sometimes I get the impression of like a few people if you don't know something, they kind of think that's weird.

Further evidencing the social pressure to keep up with news, Hillary questioned whether she was genuinely interested or primarily wanted to be seen as someone who is interested:

I don't know if I'm like truly interested, but sometimes I want to be the person who is interested. [. . .]. It's kind of like I want to be perceived as this kind of person, so I feel like that's why I do it.

On the other side of the coin, communicating about news was also described as pleasurable, especially in relation to parents. Even during her time off from university, Emory engaged in a pleasant morning ritual with her dad, in which he sent her articles she might find interesting. Nonetheless, these positive experiences did not eliminate the underlying social expectation that keeping up with news matters: “Sometimes at a certain point I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve read three of the articles you sent me, so it’s time for me to get up.’”

Tentative gendered differences emerged in how participants framed news-related social pressure. Male participants tended to use a public sphere-vocabulary (“debate,” “change opinions”) rather than referencing pressures when it comes to talking about news. They were even somewhat resistant toward the idea of keeping up with news for social reasons, with Bruno explicitly denouncing it:

I’m fine with my own knowledge, and if other people know more about it, I’m happy to hear it. But I don’t need to be a know-all. I don’t need to know everything about a topic before I start a conversation.

This does not necessarily mean these participants do not experience social pressure to keep up with news; rather, it could signal they see acknowledging such pressure as less socially acceptable. Managing social relationships thus involves not only maintaining availability and staying informed for relational purposes, but also navigating how and when being informed – and the reasons for it – is communicated to others.

Management of self-presentation

Finally, managing self-presentation involves participants’ consideration and curation of their online presence. While they described their social media use as mostly passive, they were conscious of their different audiences across platforms and accounts. The most illustrative example emerged during a lively discussion about BeReal, in which Kyle showed a keen awareness of the different temporal logics of various platforms and their consequences for his self-presentation:

I can’t handle it. Like, I already have to prepare for weeks for an Instagram post [participants laugh] no but really, BeReal, it’s making me paranoid! [. . .] Yeah I just love Snapchat, I just think, you take a picture and it’s gone again. I have zero shame in that, on Snapchat I don’t mind at all. I think Instagram is a bit more permanent.

Due to Snapchat’s fleeting nature – “snaps” disappear after the recipient has viewed it – Kyle feels comfortable sharing any content, but on the “more permanent” Instagram, he takes great care to curate his posts. For him, BeReal combines the worst of both: users only have 2 minutes to take a picture after they have opened the daily notification – although other participants explained they simply waited to open the notification until they were in a more BeReal-worthy context – yet the picture stays up all day.

Participants’ management considerations varied both between and within platforms. Gia, who uses Instagram both professionally (internship) and personally, feels “anxious” only for the former, mindful of the larger audience: “If I do the graphic wrong and there's a mistake, then already 100 people have seen it [. . .] and like, that's a lot of pressure. But if it's for my profile, it's [less].” In contrast, Kyle, who manages a social media account as a side job, does not stress about his professional account, as it feels anonymous. For Lexy, it was her imagined future professional audience that made her mindful of how to present herself – including which posts to like – on her personal Instagram account: “I know digital footprint is a thing and I know many companies look at that, so I’m very careful with that, also things I like.” These examples suggest that while participants are aware of platform affordances such as visibility, anonymity, and persistence (Hollenbaugh, 2021), the affordances that are most salient differ across individuals and contexts. They also show that even seemingly passive media use involves active considerations about what impressions they leave online.

Conclusions and discussion

This study explored how young adults handle media use in an age of “information abundance” (Boczkowski, 2021). Operationalizing this through the lens of management, our key finding is that young adults manage media not primarily by device or platform but by the function they serve. Across five areas to be managed – information flows, emotions, social relationships, attention, and self-presentation – participants planned, organized, motivated themselves, and controlled media use around three core functions: being in the loop (about major developments), maintaining connection (with friends and family), and zoning out (via mindless scrolling). Our broad approach to studying media use reverses the typical logic in audience research, which often starts with a platform, device, or genre and then asks what it is used for. By focusing on user-defined priorities, we reveal how young adults structure media use across platforms, devices, and genres, uncovering patterns that might otherwise be overlooked. While some media align with particular functions (e.g. messaging platforms for maintaining connection), many serve multiple purposes, and participants use media differently depending on their goals. Social media like Instagram exemplify this convergence of news, social connection, and leisure, explaining why they emerged as central to participants’ management concerns.

Being in the loop about major developments is marked by a balancing act between informational, relational, and emotional needs. Participants feel social and moral pressure to stay up-to-date about main news events, but also experience exposure to negative news as emotionally distressing. We extend the news-finds-me perception (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017) by demonstrating that it functions as a two-way safety net: it ensures access to important information while simultaneously shielding users from emotional impact. Rather than actively “checking” or “monitoring” the news (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015), news use becomes about being “ambiently aware” (Hermida, 2010), with news updates flowing by (cf. Thorson and Wells, 2016) and within reach if needed, but mostly observed from a safe emotional distance.

Maintaining connection is characterized by the proactive facilitation of attention: participants constantly monitor messaging apps and e-mail to stay on top of and respond to personal messages. In stark contrast, media used for zoning out are marked by proactive limitation of attention. Although the content on these media is mostly seen as enjoyable, participants tend to describe their overall experiences in terms of guilt and regret, feeling they “should” have engaged in activities that are more productive and “useful.” We suggest this guilt is due to perceived personal failure in an age of productivity and self-improvement: participants feel frustrated they don’t succeed in controlling their use of these media, and guilty that these “zoning” out media “displace” (Vanden Abeele et al., 2024) the time they could have spent on “good” media like news, literature, and arthouse films.

Our findings reveal a paradox in attention management: media demanding constant attention for connection are not experienced as intrusive, while leisure-oriented media are experienced as “interfering” (Vanden Abeele et al., 2024) and therefore moralized and restricted. This extends Deuze’s (2012) insight that pervasive media tend to become invisible, showing that visibility depends on function: media for connection are largely taken for granted, whereas leisure-oriented media remain highly salient. We interpret this paradox through self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000), pointing to fundamental human needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. For “zoning out” media, participants experience a lack of self-control (autonomy) and frustration at failing to act in line with their “should” behavior (competence). In contrast, maintaining connection media, though similarly pervasive, are not experienced as a lack of autonomy because they fulfill the need for relatedness. These findings may also help further disentangle recent findings suggesting that TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have a negative effect on mental health outcomes, whereas Snapchat and WhatsApp have positive or null effects (van der Wal et al., 2024b).

A key limitation of this study is that it focused specifically on young adults in higher education. The framework should therefore also be tested on people with different ages and levels of education. Other groups may feel stronger or weaker needs for being in the loop, maintaining connection, and zoning out, and may also have differ rationales underlying these needs. For instance, they may not experience “becoming an adult” and “noblesse oblige” as moral reasons to be up-to-date with news. Next, people in the Netherlands have relatively high trust in news (Newman et al., 2024), and while people in lower-trust societies likely manage the same areas of their media life (information flows, emotions, attention, relations, self-presentation), their concrete practices and experiences may differ. Finally, although the media day drawings in the focus groups focused on media use in the broadest sense, we explicitly asked participants to reflect on their news use as well. This design choice likely foregrounded news as a domain to be managed, which in turn may have resulted in the prominence of informational, emotional, and social considerations around news. Future studies could be designed to prioritize other domains of media management (e.g. self-presentation).