Media Mastery by College Students

The continuing evolution and use of a wide array of digital media represents challenges to understand and learn new features and applications, as well as manage the contradictions and paradoxes of both positive and negative implications, often simultaneously. This chapter explicates the concept of media mastery, the more or less conscious and more or less successful ongoing process of how people master (understand, manage, make sense of, cope with, and use) one or more new media in their everyday lives, as well as how media in turn master (manage, control, or affect) individuals and their social relations. Based on extensive and iterative analyses of transcripts of focus groups with college students in Norway and the United States and several rounds of reviewing research literature about college students’ use of new media, we develop a typology of three sets of contextual factors or occasions for media mastery (Technology, Social Aspects, and Individual Aspects), and a set of Media Mastery factors (access, boundaries, constraints, managing content, obstacles, and use awareness). We use this typology to produce a focused literature review of 218 articles from 2010 to 2018. One implication is that the concept of media mastery appears to underlie a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding uses and effects of new media.