The transformative, mediational and synergist roles of digital media

There is no doubt that innovations, particularly digital ones that provide online communication, are changing the way life is conducted across all levels of society and in all walks of life (Barton & Lee, 2013). No single group is shielded from from the transformative, mediational and synergistic effects of digital media – the overarching theme of this issue of Communication. Research and Practice.

The new levels of functionality that digital media afford to everyday communication routines, while sometimes destabilising, also provide significant benefits and new opportunities even to those who are not directly engaging with the media concerned. This age of ‘deep mediatisation’ (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 34–56) allows non-users to benefit through the improved connectivity and access to digital information available to those digitally engaged people they deal with. For instance, with increased digitisation of textual records, images, and sound combined with the widespread use of digital devices by medical practitioners, doctors in many countries can digitally access a patient’s medical history at any time and from almost any location. A doctor treating a patient visiting their town from another region can gain access to the patient’s notes, prescribed medications, and clinical test results and view clinical images. This digital access supports efficient and informed decision-making and reduces the risk of misdiagnoses and prescribing new drugs that may have dangerous interactions with existing prescriptions. Such ‘vicarious benefits’ (for the non-user) are often overlooked in discussions about the benefits of new media and digitisation. Scholars seem predisposed to study those who actually use digital platforms rather than those who do not do so yet gain considerable benefit from the digital practices of others.

For communication scholars, one of the benefits of the escalating digitisation and the steady stream of new digital communication technologies is that there is never a shortage of new topics to study. The range of digital media-related articles submitted to Communication Research and Practice is testimony to this expansion. What we see less often, however, are articles that take an ecological approach and reflect upon the situated and multidirectional influences of digitisation (Khan, Khan, & Aftab, 2015) and communication technology innovations and how these articulate with traditional media and non-mediated behaviour. One question that, in my view at least, warrants further study is the question of how new communication technologies recalibrate our thinking about communication, our perceptions of what constitutes effective communication and our expectations about how people will communicate with us and others to meet these expectations. We can see evidence of this recalibration in the way that each new communication platform or technology transforms in some way how communication scholars (and others too) talk about communication.

New vocabularies emerge to describe and analyse the effects of new platforms, apps and audiences. Our conversations and texts become liberally sprinkled with new words like meme, tweet, post, blog, emoticon, hashtag, and troll as scholars and the community at large refer to online activities, tools or actors that never existed previously. Moreover, close analysis reveals that we are increasingly using language that has a new form, grammar, spelling, and style which Ágnes Veszelszki (2017) calls ‘digilect’. By engaging others using this digilect we are not only contributing to a new way of thinking and talking about communication, we are also contributing to far reaching social and cultural transformations.

These social and cultural effects may emerge surreptitiously, under cover of the hype generated by the novel affordances of the latest new media and in the face of the burgeoning literature on media selection that leaves little doubt that media use involves multiple factors (Jung & Lyytinen, 2014), is highly contingent and strategic (George, Carlson, & Valacich, 2013). However, it is abundantly clear that the proliferation of new technology, such as integrated personal devices, is increasing the likelihood that mediated communication in some form (e.g., email, text, Facebook post, or tweet) is often the first choice when a person needs to reach out to others, either privately or in theatres such as the workplace and the community. At the same time, some digital devices we use (e.g., wearable devices) are able to reach out directly to us, providing information on such things as our connectivity, location, body profile, health status, and performance. Mediated person-to-person and device-to-person types of connectivity are well understood but what is not so well understood is how these two forms of mediatisation are shaping our offline performances and non-digital capabilities.

Veszelszki (2017) observes that the digilect is feeding back into non-digital activities. In one study she was able to demonstrate that students’ hand-written notetaking includes forms that have been spawned in the digital environment. She sees this effect as reducing the barrier that literacy poses to communication because the digilect is strongly influenced by the form of oral language. As such, the digilect is contributing to what might be called the emerging ‘post-literacy age’, a concept that has its roots in McLuhan’s (1962) notion of a post-literate society. This age is a consequence of the longstanding acceptance that the media of the time becomes the message. McLuhan (1967) famously expressed this view over half a century ago when he observed:

The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing – you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to ‘the others’. And they’re changing dramatically (McLuhan, 1967, p. 8).

While there is an overwhelming expectation that mediatisation is progressively replacing existing analog and face to face communication, the emerging post-literacy age is a much less anticipated consequence of new media. Likewise, it is easy to overlook the many examples of non-digital processes that have been augmented by digital media or have continued to resist mediatisation. One interesting example of the later is political decision-making. Despite the mediatisation of many routines and practices involved in political life, political decision-making is one realm of political activity where face to face communication persists (Pritzlaff-Scheele & Nullmeier, 2018). Pritzlaff-Scheele and Nullmeier (2018) suggest that the need for co-presence and embodied communication are fundamental to the practices of relativeness necessary for effective political decision-making. They argue, as a consequence, this process continues to be conducted face to face.

Such observations remind us that the nature and needs of human enterprises and life generally are situated, shaped by the prevailing socio-political, cultural, economic, and physical circumstances. The implication of this observation is that if we aim to effectively transfer face to face or analog communication to a digital platform or use a combination of these then we would be wise to consider carefully the affordances and limitations of each platform in relation to the other-s. Otherwise, we could easily ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ and create more problems than we solve.

Emoticons are an excellent example of how the proliferation of lean digital communication has spawned a compensatory symbolic language to express emotion on digital platforms (For a review see Aldunate & Gonzàlez-Ibàñez, 2017). The emergence of emoticons is just one development that supports the conclusion that, despite the advent of interactive digital applications that allow multi-channel communication in real time, emotion will always be more richly and authentically presented when embodied in face to face communication. This conclusion has prompted scholars from a range of disciplines (See Konrath et al.’s (2011) meta-analysis of American college students’ dispositional empathy) as well as teachers and parents to questioning how well digital natives are grasping the fine nuances of emotional expression and how capable they are at position-taking and empathising with others. As well as concerns about reduced empathy there are also concerns about community engagement and interpersonal capacities (Dolby, 2014; Konrath et al., 2011), narcissism, self-promotion, bullying and boundary violations.

Excessive time online has been termed Internet-Communication Disorder (ICD) (Wegmann & Brand, 2016). Other names for maladaptive online behaviour include Internet Addiction, Problematic Internet Use (PIU) (See Tokunaga & Rains, 2016 for a review and meta-analysis of the conceptual and operational definitions), and Specific Internet-use disorder (SIUD). The irony is that digital and hybrid (digital/analog coupling) strategies are now being deployed to encourage individuals, particularly children to limit their screen time. Recently Spark, a telecommunications company that is a big player in the provision of communication services in New Zealand, took this message one step further and created a Bluetooth-enhanced rugby ball that records the amount of time the ball is in use (See https://www.spark.co.nz/play/#/) to support their call to ‘balance screen time with playtime’.

Our concerns for high levels of Internet use should not be restricted to young children. In a recent study of tertiary students’ digital technology use, study skills, motivation, anxiety, and loneliness, Truzoli, Viganò, Galmozzi, and Reed (2019) found a negative relationship between internet addiction and motivation to study. Furthermore, those students reporting the highest internet addiction also experienced difficulties organising their learning effectively and were relatively more anxious than their peers about their approaching tests. The same study found Internet addiction was associated with loneliness and that this accentuated study difficulties.

On the other side of the ledger, Canadian research (Tonsaker, Bartlett, & Trpkov, 2014) has shown that increased use of the Internet to research ailments and treatments enhances doctors’ diagnosis ability and knowledge about treatment options, highlighting the way online activity can transform non-digital professional performance. At the same time Australian research by Laone and D’Alessandro (2014) found that membership of an online peer to peer support group for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) sufferers can empower patients and impact on the traditionally asymmetric doctor-patient relationship, providing the possibility of a constructive cyclic chain of information sharing and education between the patient, other sufferers and medical professionals. Alternatively, where doctors consider their authority is being undermined by the information-sharing and education that results from participating in the online support group, there is scope to compromise the doctor-patient relationship. The point of mentioning this case study here is to illustrate how constructive synergies can develop between the face to face and online relationships but, when they challenge existing ways of relating, they can be problematic.

Organisations seeking to make evidence-based decisions about how to develop constructive synergies between different communication media and unmediated communication encounter challenges as the available evidence is mixed. We have evidence (e.g., King & Xia, 1997) that rich communication such as that afforded by face to face, in-person conversations and group meetings over time becomes perceived as more appropriate than new digitally-mediated forms of communication (e.g., Zoom). At the same time, we also know that there are generational effects that make the generalisability of such findings questionable (See Alloway, Runac, Qureshi, & Kemp, 2014; Dolby, 2014; Hampton, Sessions, Her, & Rainie, 2009). It would seem there is scope to develop a more integrated and thus helpful literature for those wanting to make evidence-based decisions about how they can improve communicate within their organisations. This has never been more true than in these abnormal times we are facing as we battle to halt the spread of the COVID19 virus. As countries everywhere lock down to limit physical contact and thus the spread of the virus, digital communication platforms are increasingly becoming the primary form of communication available as those organisations that can continue to operate at some level are forced to reconfigure communication practices and in many cases upskill workers to work remotely. Many of our readers will be experiencing this first-hand.

Communication preferences are being usurped by pragmatic communication choices born out of the necessity to maintain physical distance. Under these conditions the extant literature becomes even less able to guide an organisation’s media choices and practices. The fortunate organisations are those with established remote working practices and guiding protocols. Many others, including some deemed to be essential services, are being trust into a hybrid communication environment where managers are working remotely while frontline staff are required to work as before, face to face. How do they make sense of this communication hybridity at work? How do managers ‘stay present’ when they are asked to stay away from the workplace to reduce personal contact? How do their workers reconcile their established expectations about leader-member communication when faced with the constraints on face to face communication imposed by this ‘new normal’? There are a plethora of questions like these that open up a wealth of new research opportunities for media studies, organisation communication, and management communication scholars. Looking more broadly, all fields of study that fall under the rubric of communication studies are being presented with important questions that require empirical answers. For instance, what protocols need to be put in place to ensure messaging by governments and their agencies reaches all sectors in society during a pandemic without generating panic, confusion and information overload? Who and what do people pay attention to and trust when confronted with a messaging tsunami during a crisis? How can we ensure digital inclusion when face to face communication is not an option? How can leaders, policy makers, and frontline response agencies obtain reliable feedback on what is happening within their constituencies? How can we manage news media in a global crisis so that socially responsible practices prevail?

These are just some of the sorts of questions the Communication Research and Practice scholarly community is well-placed to address empirically. We invite our readers from across all fields within communication studies to submit papers on studies that can support evidence-based decision making in these challenging times. We also foreshadow a call for papers for a 2021 special issue that will address health communication, including the transformative, mediational and synergist roles of digital media. This special issue will be dedicated to all those frontline health workers who have worked tirelessly and put their wellbeing on the line to attend to the sick and help to stamp out COVID19. We will welcome papers that share findings from studies that address communication practices within the health sector, between health professionals, health agencies, government and the community, especially but not exclusively during times of heightened community health risk such as during the current pandemic.

The current issue contains six interesting articles, five of which address the transformative, mediational and synergist roles of digital media. The first article, ‘The amalgamation of media use practices and food practices in a school setting: methodological reflections on doing non-media-centric media research with children’ by Krogager et al. (2020), shows how face to face and mediated communication can be coupled to enrich learning. Using data from interventions in sixth and seventh year home economics cooking classes in three Danish schools, they demonstrate how the study of media use can be approached holistically. They show how the students cooked and recorded their actions on videos that were then posted on YouTube. In doing so, this article captures the synergy that was required between media and non-media-related action or what Hepp (2012) terms ‘amalgamation’.

The second article, ‘Social media managers as intermediaries: negotiating the personal and professional in organisational communication’ by Bossio et al. (2020), uses the experiences of social media managers from seven Australian companies to explore the characteristics of the social media manager, a role that is becoming increasing important in this age of deep mediatisation. It shows how this intermediary role contributes to achieving a balance between perceived risk and innovative practise in the social media space by encouraging policy development, mentoring, and modelling an authentic organisational voice on social media.

In ‘Supermarket magazines and foodscape mediation in Australia’, Elaine Xu and Terrence Lee (2020) use content and thematic analyses to demonstrate how mediatised representations of products in online supermarket magazines from two Australian supermarket chains act as corporate controlled sites of cultural production, cultivating consumers’ food practices and food relations. The authors propose that the model developed from their analyses provides a finely nuanced means for charting supermarket foodscape mediation.

Next is Zhu and Sungkyoung Lee’s (2020) article entitled ‘Autonomous readers: the impact of news customisation on audiences’ psychological and behavioural outcomes’ which examines readers’ perceptions of customisation features on news websites. Using an experimental design, the authors find that customisation features that allow readers some choice of topics (i.e., simple customisation) increases their sense of control over their reading experience as well as their motivation to continue reading; both effects that are apparently moderated by the reader’s locus of control. These findings were not mirrored in the findings from either the control group (i.e., no customisation option) or those given more complex customisation choices. Such findings suggest online customisation has the power to transform an audience’s psychology and behaviour and thus satisfaction but needs to be understood within the context of the reader’s personality and the level of customisation provided.

In the fifth article, ‘Searching for online news content: the challenges and decisions’, Annie Blatchford (2020) uses a case study of the Victorian media’s reporting of violence against women to raise questions about the reliability of findings arising from an online publishing environment. Her argument is based on the observation that the online databases used to gather the content are increasingly inconsistent and ad hoc. She then sets out what she believes are the challenges and decisions that need to be made when collecting online news content.

The final article by Abhijit Mazumdar (2020) reports on a qualitative study that examines how India was portrayed in 143 stories about India that appeared The New York Times after the Cold War. The study found that common themes relating to India in these articles were supportive of India and portrayal the country in ways consistent with the United States’ policy stance on India at that time. In doing so, it provides support for using the Indexing Hypothesis (Bennett, 1990) which proposes that media coverage will be influenced by opinions held at the upper levels of government. Unlike the other articles in this issue, which variously showed how digital mediatisation works in concert with non-meditated processes in transformative, mediational and synergistic ways, this paper examines how non-digital media reporting is coupled to high-level government opinion.

My hope is that readers will gather new insights and understandings about transformation, mediation and synergistic practice at the interface between non-digital and face to face and digital processes from the articles in this issue. I would like to thank not only the authors for choosing to submit their work to Communication Research and Practice but also the reviewers, many of whom were working under considerable pressure due to the disruptions to their normal patterns of work that were incurred as their universities and wider communities responded to the escalating COVID19 pandemic. Without the generosity and dedication shown by our reviewers this issue would not have been possible. Our thanks need to go to our Taylor and Francis Production Team who are located in several countries where the pandemic is also unfolding. To everyone including all our ANZCA members and fellow communication scholars I wish you, your families, friends, and colleagues good health. Like each one of you, the Communication Research and Practice editorial team hope this terribly challenging time will pass quickly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).