Media Mastery: Paradoxes in College Students’ Use of Computers and Mobile Phones

The range and capabilities of multiple new media require us to master paradoxical aspects of their uses and implications. Furthermore, those same media may also come to master us, through those paradoxes. Based on prior literature, we develop a four-component taxonomy of sites of media mastery (technology, technology-use, social contexts, and individual aspects). We apply and extend this framework to analyze summaries of focus group comments from students in a Norwegian and a U.S. university about their experiences attempting to master computers and mobile phones. From these results, we apply thematic analysis to identify five paradoxes associated with the use of these devices throughout the media mastery taxonomy as well as a tension between using media convergence or media comparison to master multiple new media.