Media Logic and Media Psychology

Abstract

Individual psychology is increasingly mediated by information technologies and communication formats that are personal, instantaneous, and visual. Media logic joins individuals to social institutions. In contemporary media culture, audiences operate with the perspectives and expectations guided by information technologies and communication formats that may vary with specific media, such as TV or digital and social media. Most are dedicated to entertainment: News reports and popular culture productions that promote fear‐as‐entertainment affect individual actors and promote the politics of fear that can have social and political consequences.

An environmental problem in the making: how media logic molds scientific uncertainty in the production of news about artificial turf in Sweden

“…c) A problem: key sources' articulation of the precautionary principle, which provides journalists with the problem and fear-inducing frame as required by media logic [Altheide, 1997[Altheide, , 2020 as well as to discursively construct a problem for policy development [Colebatch, Hoppe & Noordegraaf, 2012] d) Continuity/Follow-up: the rigidity and inertness of media logic, which give priority to subject and frames already in the news. This hinders the news media's negotiation of an established problem frame and deems sources that question such a frame less relevant [Harcup & O'Neill, 2017].…”

“…The concept of media logic aims to capture how social reality, when turned into mediated events, is transformed in different ways to fit the general parameters that govern the media and the process of news evaluation. Media logic thus conceptualizes the features, format, styles, focus and grammar of a type of medium [Altheide, 2013[Altheide, , 2020. Not every phenomenon or process is deemed compatible with media logic, which means that news work constantly entails evaluation and selection among various events and phenomena.…”

Viral Fear or Panic Myth? Emotions in Ebola News and Social Media Responses

“…In addition to questions about the presence and scope of panic during health threats, scholars increasingly recognize the mediation of threats as fundamental to how they are understood culturally (Loseke 2009; McCarthy 2017; Recuber 2016; Tierney et al 2006). Media scholars often take emotions, especially fear, as an innate feature of mass media story‐telling (Altheide 2013, 2015; Bail 2012) and can assume that consuming emotional content leads to feeling such emotions (Brown et al 2019; Ungar 1998). However, sociological treatments of media and emotion—exemplified in the work of Altheide (2013), Cohen (2002), Glassner (1999, 2004), and Seale (2002)—have largely developed separately from advances in the sociology of emotion.…”

“…Focusing events, mediated through the newswork of assemblers and consumers, entail distinct practices for making sense of an evolving threat, including delimiting what and how to feel. The emotion practices of newswork include the media logics of emotional storytelling (Altheide 2015), the emotional responses of news consumers, and the emotional framings of politicians and health experts (Loseke 2009). Addressing the discursive emotions of focusing events means empirically documenting the range of emotions implicated in the newswork practices of both assemblers and consumers.…”

Socio-Psychological Factors of User Trust in Information in Electronic Mass Communication

“…However, at present, the scientific community has not developed a unified understanding of information and approaches to its study. In social psychology, information was not studied independently but was included in a broader range of issues: the unity of communication and cognition [2]; meanings, which are exchanged by the participants of communication [3]; media psychology [4][5]; psychology of rumours [6]; engineering psychology and ergonomics [7]; psychology of advertising [8]; theory of social representations [9].…”