Saturday, January 10, 2026
Recent chapter on media literacies
Michele and I never wrote about media literacy as such. We talked more about new literacies and, sometimes, about digital literacies. We explored the literature and had a sense of the field, but never wrote or did any media literacy research.
During 2025 I was invited by a Turkish academic, Meltem Ozel, to contribute a chapter about Media Literacy to a book she was editing, with the title Digital Literacy as a catalyst for Critical Thinking.
Drawing on thoughts Michele and I had tossed around over the years I said I could write something about media literacies, in the plural, if that would be acceptable. And that I would tackle the topic from the standpoint of the New Literacy Studies paradigm. I also said that I would question what I saw as a prevalent "rationality" or "veracity" emphasis in the literature, and aim to balance things out a bit by bringing affect into the picture. Meltem said that would be fine.
The chapter has recently been published, and can be accessed via an institutional link here
A pre-publication version can be found here
The mainstream discourse of media literacy has predominantly emphasized media consumption. It has stressed the importance of media consumers understanding how (mass) media function, becoming competent evaluators of media messages, and learning how to resist media influence in their own interests. Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media that make it easy for individuals and groups to operate as media sources in their own right, media literacy discourse has paid some attention to production. It has nonetheless maintained an emphasis on veracity, evaluation and influence, and the focus remains overwhelmingly on consumption. This chapter argues that we have reached a point where media production is so complex, varied, dispersed, and ubiquitous, and where influence is so widely celebrated and participatory, that it is more useful to think in terms of media literacies than a singular discourse of media literacy. It is also helpful to balance out the more “rationalist” orientation of media literacy by acknowledging the primacy of human desire and affect within so much contemporary participation in media. Drawing on the New Literacy Studies, the chapter provisionally explores the potential for thinking in terms of media literacies in the plural and beyond a “rationalist” orientation alone.
