The Ephemeral Nature of Digital Journalism and Its Structural Impact on Public Attention

Abstract

Digital journalism is fleeting, and now it has become a system of temporal compression; with the joint construction of technology and the platform economy, it is a "meta-rule" in the information ecology. The three dimensions of ephemerality are temporal density, mode of existence and value logic, and this paper studies the technological generation and normalisation of ephemerality. Based on the model of attentional structure in this paper, it has been determined that attention is currently in a "liquid state" and is no longer in a "steady state". Therefore, ephemerality will disrupt the pattern of public attention, and over a long period, it will have a negative effect by promoting the fragmentation of attention; thus, it will break the cycle of deep engagement and foster cognitive superficiality and fluidity in identity. It can be seen from the above that the two are closely related in structure, and this provides a reference for the study of information ecology in the digital age.