Quantifying the New Media Literacy of Rural People: An Online Video Entertainment Perspective

Abstract

This study attempts to quantify the level of new media literacy of the rural people of Tamil Nadu, India. New media literacy is vital for the digital transformation, catering to the requirements of the latest technological era, to gain autonomy in accessing the new media. This study is based on quantifying the new media literacy from the perspective of the respondents' online video entertainment consumption. The study conducted among 230 rural respondents, is segmented into two parts. One measures the new media literacy of the rural people based on ten indicators extracted from the literature. It resulted that among ten indicators, Understanding, Consuming, and Analysis skills are high among the respondents, respectively. The respondents were found to have a lower level of skills for Production and Creation of content using new media technologies. The second part of the work is about the study of the relationship between demographic characteristics and new media literacy of the respondents. It was found that there is a significant relationship between Age, Education and Income on new media literacy, while Gender of the respondents does not affect the level of new media literacy.