Harsh Taneja
Biographic Data
| ID | 4603040 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harsh Taneja |
| GIVEN NAMES | Harsh |
| FAMILY NAME | Taneja |
| SIGNATURE | TANEJA H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4630-8911 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Network Analysis in Advertising Research, Reimagined: A Methodological Catalyst for Structural and Institutional Insight
As digital systems increasingly mediate advertising, the field must move beyond message effects to engage with the structural and institutional dynamics that define the advertising ecosystem. This article argues that network analysis—when reimagined beyond its typical application to social media interactions—offers powerful tools for understanding the relationships among brands, consumers, media, influencers, and other intermediaries and stakehol…
When news is entertainment: Explaining the persistence of misinformation through the information environment
Why does misinformation persist despite its corrections? To address this issue, we propose the ‘news as entertainment’ framework, explaining how commercial considerations of the media industry shape news consumption. Using a strategic case study, we examine India's information environment through this paradigm. Guided by industry metrics, we reveal the interplay of competing social and economic interests in a context marked by high choice and pol…
Visibility of K-pop in the U.S: Global rankings, ‘audience mis-aggregation’, and mainstream attention to niche genre
K-pop, a niche genre appealing to certain audience segments in the global market, has now attracted mainstream attention of music industries and general audiences within and beyond Asia. Previous studies often attribute niche genres’ visibility in a cultural market to audience segmentation and the prominence of niche tastes; however, K-pop’s mainstream visibility in its transnational spread complicates this argument. Integrating the sociology of …
Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’ audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices
As the media industry employs big data to imagine audiences, audiences simultaneously seek to understand how their digital traces are being converted into audience data to inform the industry. We explore how fans map stakeholders in the Chinese idol industry, perceive stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data, and use those perceptions to guide their data-driven practices. We conducted a netnography of INTO1’s fandoms as a case …
Predicting streaming audiences for a channel’s on-demand TV shows: Discerning the influences of choice architecture, consumer agency, and content attributes
Contemporary corporate discourse asserts that viewers have a high degree of control over what they watch on video-on-demand (VOD) platforms, echoing early academic assumptions about online users’ autonomy. Such beliefs are now being interrogated, an endeavour this study continues by analysing data on the consumption and characteristics of television programmes viewed on a channel’s VOD service and – for comparison – via its linear broadcast. Cruc…
Distrust Profiles: Identifying the Factors That Shape Journalism’s Credibility Crisis
Trust in news is declining globally and has been for some time a phenomenon that has been amplified in the context of a global pandemic, the rise in anti-media populism, and social and political unrest. Overall, public trust in journalism remains low (44% globally), according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 . Building on a growing body of research on predictors of (dis)trust among news audiences, this study examines survey data …
A Division of Labor: The Role of Big Data Analysis in the Repertoire of Internet Research Methods
In recent years, large-scale analysis of log data from digital devices - often termed ""big data analysis"" (Lazer, Kennedy, King, & Vespignani, 2014) - have taken hold in the field of internet research. Through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and commercial measurement, scholars have been able to analyze social media users (Freelon 2014) and web audiences (Taneja, 2016) on an uprecedented scale. And by developing digital research tools…
Platform enclosure of human behavior and its measurement: Using behavioral trace data against platform episteme
Digital trace data from giant platforms are gaining ground in the study of human behavior. This trend accompanies contestations regarding representativeness, privacy, access, and commercial origin. Complementing existing discussions and focusing on knowledge production, we draw attention to the different measurement regimes within passively captured behavioral logs from industries. Taking an institutional perspective on measurement as a managemen…
Going with the flow: Nudging attention online
Theories explaining the impacts of online media often swing between the actions of empowered individuals and the distribution structures put in place by powerful corporations. To explicate how these factors interact, we adapt the concept of audience flow to highlight the temporal dimension of web use and demonstrate how digital architectures subtly nudge masses of people into online attention flows. We identify sequential usage patterns through a…
How did the data extraction business model come to dominate? Changes in the web use ecosystem before mobiles surpassed personal computers
It is widely believed that the spread of data extraction technologies on the Internet has led to the erosion of traditional professional content providers and the transformation of the online media ecosystem. To investigate this shift in media ecology, we conduct relational analyses of actual user behavior, departing from existing research that primarily focuses on business institutions and designs of technology. We assess the prevalence of the d…
Building and Interpreting Audience Networks: A Response to Mukerjee, Majo-Vazquez & Gonzalez-Bailon
Building audience networks offers a way to apply the tools of network analysis to traditional audience data. Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, and González-Bailón (2018) have done this in their article on news consumption. They situate their analysis by making extensive reference to studies that we, and others, have published since 2011. Our colleagues at Annenberg and Oxford claim to have identified and corrected “flaws” in our work that have “started to …
The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption
In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the m…
Rethinking the generational gap in online news use: An infrastructural perspective
Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of…
Using Commercial Audience Measurement Data in Academic Research
Surveys, although widely used to measure media exposure, are blunt instruments. In today's complex media environments it is difficult to accurately recall usage. Audience measurement data, often collected by the media industries for commercial purposes, offer an alternative. However, unlike surveys, where individuals are the unit of analysis, audience measurement companies report data aggregated at the level of media outlets. Despite this limitat…
Mapping an audience-centric World Wide Web: A departure from hyperlink analysis
This article argues that maps of the Web’s structure based solely on technical infrastructure such as hyperlinks may bear little resemblance to maps based on Web usage, as cultural factors drive the latter to a larger extent. To test this thesis, the study constructs two network maps of 1000 globally most popular Web domains, one based on hyperlinks and the other using an “audience-centric” approach with ties based on shared audience traffic betw…
Reimagining Internet Geographies: A User-Centric Ethnological Mapping of the World Wide Web
We propose a new user-centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces, in contrast to existing imageries that prioritize Internet infrastructure. We construct ethnological maps of WWW usage through a network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular websites at 3 time points and develop granular measures for exploring global participation in online communication. Our results reveal the significant …
How Do Global Audiences Take Shape? The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use: The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use
This study investigates the role of both cultural and technological factors in determining audience formation on a global scale. It integrates theories of media choice with theories of global cultural consumption and tests them by analyzing shared audience traffic between the world's 1,000 most popular websites. We find that language and geographic similarities are more powerful predictors of audience overlap than hyperlinks and genre similarity,…
Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage With Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain web users' choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and access bl…
Media consumption across platforms: Identifying user-defined repertoires
New media have made available a wide range of platforms and content choices. However, audiences cope with abundant choices by using more narrowly defined repertoires. Unfortunately, we know little of how users create repertoires across media platforms. This study uses factor analysis to identify user-defined repertoires from data obtained by following 495 users throughout an entire day. Results indicate the presence of four repertoires that are p…
Media consumption across platforms: Identifying user-defined repertoires
New media have made available a wide range of platforms and content choices. However, audiences cope with abundant choices by using more narrowly defined repertoires. Unfortunately, we know little of how users create repertoires across media platforms. This study uses factor analysis to identify user-defined repertoires from data obtained by following 495 users throughout an entire day. Results indicate the presence of four repertoires that are p…
The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption
In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the m…
Rethinking the generational gap in online news use: An infrastructural perspective
Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of…
Going with the flow: Nudging attention online
Theories explaining the impacts of online media often swing between the actions of empowered individuals and the distribution structures put in place by powerful corporations. To explicate how these factors interact, we adapt the concept of audience flow to highlight the temporal dimension of web use and demonstrate how digital architectures subtly nudge masses of people into online attention flows. We identify sequential usage patterns through a…
Platform enclosure of human behavior and its measurement: Using behavioral trace data against platform episteme
Digital trace data from giant platforms are gaining ground in the study of human behavior. This trend accompanies contestations regarding representativeness, privacy, access, and commercial origin. Complementing existing discussions and focusing on knowledge production, we draw attention to the different measurement regimes within passively captured behavioral logs from industries. Taking an institutional perspective on measurement as a managemen…
Reimagining Internet Geographies: A User-Centric Ethnological Mapping of the World Wide Web
We propose a new user-centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces, in contrast to existing imageries that prioritize Internet infrastructure. We construct ethnological maps of WWW usage through a network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular websites at 3 time points and develop granular measures for exploring global participation in online communication. Our results reveal the significant …
Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage With Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain web users' choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and access bl…
Using Commercial Audience Measurement Data in Academic Research
Surveys, although widely used to measure media exposure, are blunt instruments. In today's complex media environments it is difficult to accurately recall usage. Audience measurement data, often collected by the media industries for commercial purposes, offer an alternative. However, unlike surveys, where individuals are the unit of analysis, audience measurement companies report data aggregated at the level of media outlets. Despite this limitat…
Mapping an audience-centric World Wide Web: A departure from hyperlink analysis
This article argues that maps of the Web’s structure based solely on technical infrastructure such as hyperlinks may bear little resemblance to maps based on Web usage, as cultural factors drive the latter to a larger extent. To test this thesis, the study constructs two network maps of 1000 globally most popular Web domains, one based on hyperlinks and the other using an “audience-centric” approach with ties based on shared audience traffic betw…
Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’ audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices
As the media industry employs big data to imagine audiences, audiences simultaneously seek to understand how their digital traces are being converted into audience data to inform the industry. We explore how fans map stakeholders in the Chinese idol industry, perceive stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data, and use those perceptions to guide their data-driven practices. We conducted a netnography of INTO1’s fandoms as a case …
Media consumption across platforms: Identifying user-defined repertoires
New media have made available a wide range of platforms and content choices. However, audiences cope with abundant choices by using more narrowly defined repertoires. Unfortunately, we know little of how users create repertoires across media platforms. This study uses factor analysis to identify user-defined repertoires from data obtained by following 495 users throughout an entire day. Results indicate the presence of four repertoires that are p…
Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage With Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain web users' choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and access bl…
How Do Global Audiences Take Shape? The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use: The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use
This study investigates the role of both cultural and technological factors in determining audience formation on a global scale. It integrates theories of media choice with theories of global cultural consumption and tests them by analyzing shared audience traffic between the world's 1,000 most popular websites. We find that language and geographic similarities are more powerful predictors of audience overlap than hyperlinks and genre similarity,…
Using Commercial Audience Measurement Data in Academic Research
Surveys, although widely used to measure media exposure, are blunt instruments. In today's complex media environments it is difficult to accurately recall usage. Audience measurement data, often collected by the media industries for commercial purposes, offer an alternative. However, unlike surveys, where individuals are the unit of analysis, audience measurement companies report data aggregated at the level of media outlets. Despite this limitat…
Mapping an audience-centric World Wide Web: A departure from hyperlink analysis
This article argues that maps of the Web’s structure based solely on technical infrastructure such as hyperlinks may bear little resemblance to maps based on Web usage, as cultural factors drive the latter to a larger extent. To test this thesis, the study constructs two network maps of 1000 globally most popular Web domains, one based on hyperlinks and the other using an “audience-centric” approach with ties based on shared audience traffic betw…
Reimagining Internet Geographies: A User-Centric Ethnological Mapping of the World Wide Web
We propose a new user-centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces, in contrast to existing imageries that prioritize Internet infrastructure. We construct ethnological maps of WWW usage through a network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular websites at 3 time points and develop granular measures for exploring global participation in online communication. Our results reveal the significant …
Rethinking the generational gap in online news use: An infrastructural perspective
Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of…
Building and Interpreting Audience Networks: A Response to Mukerjee, Majo-Vazquez & Gonzalez-Bailon
Building audience networks offers a way to apply the tools of network analysis to traditional audience data. Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, and González-Bailón (2018) have done this in their article on news consumption. They situate their analysis by making extensive reference to studies that we, and others, have published since 2011. Our colleagues at Annenberg and Oxford claim to have identified and corrected “flaws” in our work that have “started to …
The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption
In light of the recent US election, many fear that “fake news” has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the m…
How did the data extraction business model come to dominate? Changes in the web use ecosystem before mobiles surpassed personal computers
It is widely believed that the spread of data extraction technologies on the Internet has led to the erosion of traditional professional content providers and the transformation of the online media ecosystem. To investigate this shift in media ecology, we conduct relational analyses of actual user behavior, departing from existing research that primarily focuses on business institutions and designs of technology. We assess the prevalence of the d…
A Division of Labor: The Role of Big Data Analysis in the Repertoire of Internet Research Methods
In recent years, large-scale analysis of log data from digital devices - often termed ""big data analysis"" (Lazer, Kennedy, King, & Vespignani, 2014) - have taken hold in the field of internet research. Through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and commercial measurement, scholars have been able to analyze social media users (Freelon 2014) and web audiences (Taneja, 2016) on an uprecedented scale. And by developing digital research tools…
Platform enclosure of human behavior and its measurement: Using behavioral trace data against platform episteme
Digital trace data from giant platforms are gaining ground in the study of human behavior. This trend accompanies contestations regarding representativeness, privacy, access, and commercial origin. Complementing existing discussions and focusing on knowledge production, we draw attention to the different measurement regimes within passively captured behavioral logs from industries. Taking an institutional perspective on measurement as a managemen…
Going with the flow: Nudging attention online
Theories explaining the impacts of online media often swing between the actions of empowered individuals and the distribution structures put in place by powerful corporations. To explicate how these factors interact, we adapt the concept of audience flow to highlight the temporal dimension of web use and demonstrate how digital architectures subtly nudge masses of people into online attention flows. We identify sequential usage patterns through a…
Distrust Profiles: Identifying the Factors That Shape Journalism’s Credibility Crisis
Trust in news is declining globally and has been for some time a phenomenon that has been amplified in the context of a global pandemic, the rise in anti-media populism, and social and political unrest. Overall, public trust in journalism remains low (44% globally), according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 . Building on a growing body of research on predictors of (dis)trust among news audiences, this study examines survey data …
Predicting streaming audiences for a channel’s on-demand TV shows: Discerning the influences of choice architecture, consumer agency, and content attributes
Contemporary corporate discourse asserts that viewers have a high degree of control over what they watch on video-on-demand (VOD) platforms, echoing early academic assumptions about online users’ autonomy. Such beliefs are now being interrogated, an endeavour this study continues by analysing data on the consumption and characteristics of television programmes viewed on a channel’s VOD service and – for comparison – via its linear broadcast. Cruc…
When news is entertainment: Explaining the persistence of misinformation through the information environment
Why does misinformation persist despite its corrections? To address this issue, we propose the ‘news as entertainment’ framework, explaining how commercial considerations of the media industry shape news consumption. Using a strategic case study, we examine India's information environment through this paradigm. Guided by industry metrics, we reveal the interplay of competing social and economic interests in a context marked by high choice and pol…
Visibility of K-pop in the U.S: Global rankings, ‘audience mis-aggregation’, and mainstream attention to niche genre
K-pop, a niche genre appealing to certain audience segments in the global market, has now attracted mainstream attention of music industries and general audiences within and beyond Asia. Previous studies often attribute niche genres’ visibility in a cultural market to audience segmentation and the prominence of niche tastes; however, K-pop’s mainstream visibility in its transnational spread complicates this argument. Integrating the sociology of …
Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’ audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices
As the media industry employs big data to imagine audiences, audiences simultaneously seek to understand how their digital traces are being converted into audience data to inform the industry. We explore how fans map stakeholders in the Chinese idol industry, perceive stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data, and use those perceptions to guide their data-driven practices. We conducted a netnography of INTO1’s fandoms as a case …
Network Analysis in Advertising Research, Reimagined: A Methodological Catalyst for Structural and Institutional Insight
As digital systems increasingly mediate advertising, the field must move beyond message effects to engage with the structural and institutional dynamics that define the advertising ecosystem. This article argues that network analysis—when reimagined beyond its typical application to social media interactions—offers powerful tools for understanding the relationships among brands, consumers, media, influencers, and other intermediaries and stakehol…
Computer Science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Business (11 works) · Advertising (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works) · World Wide Web (8 works) · Complex Network Analysis Techniques (6 works) · Internet privacy (6 works) · Social media (6 works)