Immersive Technologies in Media: Towards the Concept of Generative Mediatization?

Abstract

The practices of so-called immersive media have been developing in the past few years. The immersive media situation characteristics, infrastructure, content and social aspects have been identified through the use of a multilevel structural and functional methodology, and make it possible to fix its specificity at all levels. The new format of the immersive media situation leads to changes in approaches to the mediatization studies. In the article, to study the media immersive communicative situation a generative approach is proposed for the first time. It is relevant to topological thinking, and to the modern immanent picture of the world, when a person and technology co-create a new form. Along with the generative approach and generative design, the necessity of applying relevant paradigms and methods of psychology to form new theoretical and methodological foundations of immersive user-centric media communication is substantiated. Several new concepts and terms are introduced, in particular, the term immersive hypermediation, which is opposite to immediacy as a classical criterion of media effectiveness. As a result, the analysis of the essence and features of immersive media projects allows fixing the premises of immersive paradigm shift in mediatization studies.