Media Psychology Approaches in Digitalization and Human Communication

Introduction

Media has fundamentally changed over the past decade. The explosion of new communication technologies is bringing waves of change to the lives of people with access to communication technologies around the world. Media psychology is the study of how individuals perceive, interpret, apply, and respond to a world dominated by media. It is important to note that this continues to be a new academic and practical field that has emerged as a solution to the prevalence of communications technology over the last 50 years. This field of research has developed into a professional field due to its social and beneficial demands. This has to do with including psychological frameworks in media contexts (Rutledge, 2012). Media psychology, the multidisciplinary nature of the field, and the way people interact with media in all aspects of their lives, from work, education, entertainment to social engagement, are constantly changing. The goal of media psychologists is to answer these questions by combining an understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotion with an equivalent understanding of media technology. Today media is present in almost every area of life and is an increasingly important area of study as the world becomes more connected. Unlike some media studies, media psychology is not just about content. Media psychology considers the system as a whole. Psychology is key to understanding the impact of technology. The goal of media psychologists is to find answers and solutions by combining our understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotion.

Media psychology is a new branch of psychology that studies how people are affected by mediated communication. Media psychology relies heavily on psychology and communication, but also incorporates other fields of science such as sociology, media studies, anthropology, and fan studies. Additionally, the field is still scattered across many disciplines, with many academics studying the effects of media on individuals who do not consider psychology as their primary area of interest. Scientists have pointed out that there is no beginning or end. It's a continuous loop that includes technology developers, content producers, content awareness, and user reactions. It should be different from previous research in that it provides a new approach to understanding and clarifying the theoretical structure of communication.

On the other perspective, digitalization and globalization have changed the way of human interactions. Human communication focuses on meeting the basic needs of association and interaction includes all collective activities related to the exchange of ideas, facts and data from one person to another. Human communication for decades involved the development of cues and gestures before humans developed spoken language (Smith, 1993). Since the advent of mobile phones and social media in the late 2000s, much research has been done on the impact of technology on social interaction and personal communication (Przybylski and Weinstein, 2013). One study investigated the relationship between the presence of mobile devices and the quality of real-world face-to-face social interactions. In the near-natural perspective, scholars found that conversations without mobile communication technology were rated significantly higher than those with mobile devices (Misra, Cheng, Genevie, and Yuan, 2014). Human communication is perceived difficult for those who conducted the conversation without using a mobile device as it was reported higher levels of empathic concern, whereas those who conducted the conversation in the presence of a mobile device reported lower levels of empathy (Misra et al., 2014).