Perceiving Media Change as a Form of Media Literacy: Using a 360-Degree Video to Analyze the Mediatization of Social Life

Abstract

This study focuses on the subjective perception of complex mediatization processes. To encourage the study participants to reflect on everyday media practices, a self-produced, interactive 360-degree video was used as a qualitative stimulus to make typical after-work encounters tangible before these were discussed in a group setting. Based on a qualitative evaluation, a total of 20 perceptions illustrate how people perceive media change primarily in communicative actions that are characterized by a change in empathy, which we refer to as communicative avoidance or communicative attention. By applying several dimensions of media literacy, we can conclude that communication actions are perceived from a cognitive, affective, social, and critical-reflective perspective, meaning that people can reflect, justify, and react to communicative actions or draw results from them. It shows that some aspects of media change are more apparent than others and that the level of media literacy determines the extent to which people can perceive mediatization processes.