Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Digital media users communicate, process information, work, participate and learn in a phygital world: they multitask, rely on visual more than textual content, adopt new behaviors that are embodied and embedded in virtual contexts, and expect instant gratifications. Digital devices start “taking over” our basic cognitive functions: we “extend” our memory and cognition to disks (Clark, 2008; Car, 2009; Sparrow et al, 2011) and rely on smartphones to “offload” cognitively demanding tasks, such as analytical reasoning (Barr et al. 2015); we feel smartphones as our extension and separation from them heightens anxiety and impairs executive functioning (Clayton et al, 2015; Hartando & Yang, 2016). Thus, we become conditioned to learn by bypassing the slow System 2 type thinking in favor of System 1 shortcuts (Kahneman, 2011) as, for example, when acting in technology rich environments (such as smartphone screens overloaded with content, colors, cues, notifications, sounds etc). The important observation that technological and informational elements can serve as a mechanistic backbone that realizes human mental states and processes (Smart, 2017) urges for Media Literacy education in all realms of learning –especially at school- for example, for evaluating reliability of online information or setting criteria for AI detection. In practical terms, while digital technologies offer access to resources and motivate people to develop new functional and critical skills, they also introduce challenges such as information overload or memory deficits (Călinescu, 2024). On the other hand, memory functioning can be improved via smartphone-based memory strategies, which shows possible positive prospects in treating cognitive impairments (Scullin et. al., 2022), while active memory cueing by using digital devices can also be supportive to cognitive enhancement (Kalnikaité & Whittaker, 2008). The findings of my doctoral thesis research (2022) with 1300 university students show a positive correlation between media literacy levels and respondents’ perception that digital tools allow them to perform tasks they would not be able to do without technology. In practice, this means that machines seem to play an active role in the individual’s cognitive processes and skills. This functional dependence on technologies is critical for the individual’s learning, understanding, decision-making, or other high-order cognitive functions, thus making media literacy education even more urgent in learning environments.