Abstract
Given the recent development of smart devices, users are producing, sharing, and acquiring a variety of information via the Internet and social network services (SNSs). Because users tend to use multiple media simultaneously according to their goals and preferences, domestic SNS users use around 2.09 media concurrently on average. Since the information provided by such media is usually textually represented, recent studies have been actively conducting textual analysis in order to understand users more deeply. Earlier studies using textual analysis focused on analyzing a document's contents without substantive consideration of the diverse characteristics of the source medium. However, current studies argue that analytical and interpretive approaches should be applied differently according to the characteristics of a document's source. Documents can be classified into the following types: informative documents for delivering information, expressive documents for expressing emotions and aesthetics, operational documents for inducing the recipient's behavior, and audiovisual media documents for supplementing the above three functions through images and music. Further, documents can be classified according to their contents, which comprise facts, concepts, procedures, principles, rules, stories, opinions, and descriptions. Documents have unique characteristics according to the source media by which they are distributed. In terms of newspapers, only highly trained people tend to write articles for public dissemination. In contrast, with SNSs, various types of users can freely write any message and such messages are distributed in an unpredictable way. Again, in the case of newspapers, each article exists independently and does not tend to have any relation to other articles. However, messages (original tweets) on Twitter, for example, are highly organized and regularly duplicated and repeated through replies and retweets. There have been many studies focusing on the different characteristics between newspapers and SNSs. However, it is difficult to find a study that focuses on the difference between the two media from the perspective of supply and demand. We can regard the articles of newspapers as a kind of information supply, whereas messages on various SNSs represent a demand for information. By investigating traditional newspapers and SNSs from the perspective of supply and demand of information, we can explore and explain the information dilemma more clearly. For example, there may be superfluous issues that are heavily reported in newspaper articles despite the fact that users seldom have much interest in these issues. Such overproduced information is not only a waste of media resources but also makes it difficult to find valuable, in-demand information. Further, some issues that are covered by only a few newspapers may be of high interest to SNS users. To alleviate the deleterious effects of information asymmetries, it is necessary to analyze the supply and demand of each information source and, accordingly, provide information flexibly. Such an approach would allow the value of information to be explored and approximated on the basis of the supply-demand balance. Conceptually, this is very similar to the price of goods or services being determined by the supply-demand relationship. Adopting this concept, media companies could focus on the production of highly in-demand issues that are in short supply. In this study, we selected Internet news sites and Twitter as representative media for investigating information supply and demand, respectively. We present the notion of News Value Index (NVI), which evaluates the value of news information in terms of the magnitude of Twitter messages associated with it. In addition, we visualize the change of information value over time using the NVI. We conducted an analysis using 387,014 news articles and 31,674,795 Twitter messages. The analysis results revealed interesting patterns: most issues show lower NVI than average of the whole issue, whereas a few issues show steadily higher NVI than the average.
최근 정보 유통의 주요 매체인 인터넷 뉴스와 SNS의 매체 간 특성 차이를 주목한 많은 연구가 있었음에도 불구하고, 양 매체의 차이를 정보의 수요 및 공급 관점에서 파악한 연구는 상대적으로 매우 부족하다. 일반적으로 새로운 정보는 언론사의 뉴스 기사를 통해 대중에게 노출되고, 대중은 이러한 기사에 대한 의견 또는 추가정보를 SNS를 통해 공유함으로써 해당 정보를 수용함과 동시에 확산시킨다. 이러한 측면에서 언론사가 뉴스를 제공하는 행위를 정보의 공급으로 파악할 수 있으며, 대중은 SNS를 통해 이에 대한 관심을 능동적으로 나타냄으로써 해당 정보에 대한 소비 수요를 표출하는 것으로 이해할 수 있다. 이는 상품 및 서비스의 가격이 수요와 공급의 관계에 의해 결정되는 것과 유사한 원리로, 정보의 가치를 정보 수요와 정보 공급의 관계에 기반을 두어 측정할 수 있음을 시사한다. 본 연구에서는 정보 공급의 대표 매체로 인터넷 뉴스 기사를, 정보 수요를 나타내는 대표 매체로 트위터를 선정하고, 특정 이슈에 대한 뉴스의 정보로서의 가치를 이와 관련된 트위터의 양으로 평가하는 뉴스가치지수(NVI, News Value Index)를 고안하여 제시한다. 구체적으로 제안 방법론은 각 이슈별로 NVI를 도출하고 이를 통해 시간의 흐름에 따른 정보 가치의 변화를 시각화하여 나타낸다. 또한 본 연구에서는 제안 방법론의 실무 적용 가능성을 평가하기 위해 인터넷 뉴스 387,018건과 트윗 31,674,795건에 대한 실험을 수행하였다. 그 결과 대부분의 이슈가 전체 정보 시장의 평균 가치에 수렴하는 형태로 변화함을 알 수 있었으며, 꾸준히 평균 이상의 가치를 가지며 정보 시장을 장악하는 등 특이한 양상을 보이는 흥미로운 이슈도 존재함을 파악할 수 있었다.
