Research On The Difference Of Information Characteristics Between Information Encountering And Seeking Based On Social Media

For a long time,the field of information seeking behavior tends to focus on active information search,but less research on passive information acquisition.As a common way of obtaining information on the Internet,online information encountering has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years.At present,the research on information encountering is still at the initial stage,mainly focused on the definition of concept,scope of information encountering,and also have explored further influence on information encountering factors,but only focus on the user and environmental factors.Information as the factor that directly trigger the encountering is rarely involved in the influence factors researches because of the limitation of the method.Based on this,this paper aims to investigate the characteristics of the information that users encountered and seeked in social media platform,and find out the differences between the information encountering and the information seeking in the information obtained by users.Because the research of information seeking is more common and mature,this paper mainly focuses on the research design of information encountering.This research uses experiment method to directly observe the user's information encountering and seeking experience,visually recorded the information's external features,and combined with questionnaire method,the users will evaluate the internal characteristics of the information they obtained.In addition,we formulated the criterion of information encountering that can be used to distinguish information encountering and information seeeking.Based on the previous related research,this paper puts forward two research questions,which are:1.What are the characteristics of the information obtained by information encountering and information seeking?2.What are differences between information encountering and information seeking on the characteristics of information obtained?The experimental results show that under the purposeless information browsing,users' information encountering experience is very frequent,that almost half of the click happens to encounter information.The two ways to get information on some of the features show similarity,including:high degree of understanding,concern,praise and novelty,most of these information is related to the user's interest,most of the information is located in the F section of the page that attracted users' focus,and the information is main of conventional size,richness of most obtained information is high,the medium richness information is the most frequent obtained.In addition,users tend to click text information when presenting the overall information in a combination of multiple elements.On the source of information,the source of encountered information is the same between individual and system.,and the information seeked is more from system.When compared with the information seeking,though information encountered present high degree of understanding,concern,praise and novelty overall,but the degree of understanding and praise are significantly lower than the information that seeked.These two way also have significant differences in the distribution of information sources,the information obtained though information seeking is more from the system,and the information encountered has no tendency on sources,the information derived from the system and personal is equivalent.This research not only has significance to the system design,but also provides guidance and direction for further research exploring the impact of information factors on information encountering,and it improves and perfects the research method system of information encountering field.