Visual literacy in New Media: Systematic Review and Mapping of the Literature

Many researchers have dealt previously with visual literacy in the context of new media and the use of images. The goal of this manuscript is to present a systematic review of the literature to identify, analyze and classify the published approaches and by this way find, give support or improve different research works which are carried out under the perspective of the new technologies. As results, this study identified 39 papers that link the visual literacy with the new technologies, or the images used in social networks. There have been found different main approaches where are related to the new media with visual literacy in education, with ICTs, art and design, communication, psychology, demography, professional aspects or information sciences. However, those approaches lacked standardization and were mainly ad-hoc solutions for each presented research scenario. The primary field of research where this concept is used is the use of images in education. In this field, the authors try to demonstrate how daily images can be related to formal learning. Some of the outcomes and solutions found in the literature (albeit not much frequent) conclude that thanks to some ad-hoc tools designed for each experiment, the researchers can achieve the goal of observing the status of visual literacy in users of new technologies and new media. Despite that several research efforts work in this subject and its challenges, the research community needs to continue improving the research in this area through the application of new techniques and methods which can lead to achieving standardized solutions. Moreover, thus, let researchers explore new ways of analyzing and interpreting the visual literacy avoiding custom solutions or evaluating well-known proposals from the literature.