THE NEED FOR INFORMATION AND THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AS FACTORS OF CRITICAL AND UNCRITICAL DISSEMINATION OF PANDEMIC NEWS
Relevance. Te modern society creates the image of a successful person as actively interacting with diferent information fows, including an impressive stream of news content. Tis paper assumes that there is a personal need for tracking and spreading news that develops in the interaction between person and digital world. Te individual level of this need could explain the interaction with information (its critical and uncritical dissemination) and the subjective experience of its redundancy and inaccuracy, including those experiences and actions in a pandemic situation. Te aim of the study was to reveal the relationship of the subjective need for news with personal values, beliefs about technologies (“technophilia”) and the dissemination of news about the pandemic. Method. 270 people (aged 18 to 61) flled out Te short (Schwartz) Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), Beliefs about New Technologies Questionnaire, Monitoring of Information about Coronavirus Scale as well as items on the subjective need for receiving and disseminating news, readiness for critical and non-critical dissemination of news about pandemics, subjective experiences of redundancy and distrust of pandemicrelated information. Results. According to the results, the Need for News Scale allows assessing the subjective importance of receiving news and discussing them with other people and is characterized by sufcient consistency and factor validity. Te need for regular news is more pronounced among men, older people, people with higher education, married people, people who have children, while the need to discuss news is not related to sociodemographic factors. For people, who are more prone to technophilia, it is more important to regularly receive and discuss news information with others, which, in turn, mediates the relationship between technophilia and monitoring news about coronavirus. Te need for news dissemination mediates the relationship between technophilia and readiness for critical and non-critical dissemination of information about the pandemic.