Revisiting Richard Hoggart’s classic work The Uses of Literacy (1957), this book applies Hoggart’s framework to media literacy today, examining media literacy’s various uses, the tensions between them and what this means for people, communities and the contemporary configurations of social class. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about how his working class community, in the North of England, were at once using the new ‘mass literacy’ for self-improvement, education, social mobility and civic engagement and, at the same time, the powerful were seizing the opportunity also to use this expansion in literacy, through the new popular culture, for commercial and political ends. Working in the intersection between education, cultural studies and literacies, the authors write about media literacy as a contested, under-theorised field through Hoggart’s ‘line of sight’ to provide a perspective on media literacy and working class culture today. This reimagining of a classic work, piercingly relevant to studies of class in Britain in 2019, will be of key interest to scholars in Media Studies, as well as interested readers in Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics and Sociology.

Media literacy is often focused on evaluating the message rather than reflecting on the medium. Bringing together postphenomenology, media ecology, posthumanism, and complexity theory, Richard Lewis’s book offers a method for such a reflection and shows how our everyday media environments constitute us as (post)human subjects: one that is becoming and constitutes through relations – also with our media technologies. An original interdisciplinary effort – including for example the term 'intrasubjective mediation' – and a must-read book for everyone interested in how we become with and through technologies. Prof Mark Coeckelbergh, University of Vienna Technology, Media Literacy, and the Human Subject is a clearly and concisely written book that employs a fruitful transdisciplinary approach. It at once offers an excellent grounding in the literature, whilst simultaneously developing a useful tool for students to reflect deeply and critically upon their own engagement with media. Thoroughly recommended. Alexander Thomas, University of East London What does it mean to be media literate in today’s world? How are we transformed by the many media infrastructures around us? We are immersed in a world mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). From hardware like smartphones, smartwatches, and home assistants to software like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, our lives have become a complex, interconnected network of relations. Scholarship on media literacy has tended to focus on developing the skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages without considering or weighing the impact of the technological medium—how it enables and constrains both messages and media users. Additionally, there is often little attention paid to the broader context of interrelations which affect our engagement with media technologies. This book addresses these issues by providing a transdisciplinary method that allows for both practical and theoretical analyses of media investigations. Informed by postphenomenology, media ecology, philosophical posthumanism, and complexity theory the author proposes both a framework and a pragmatic instrument for understanding the multiplicity of relations that all contribute to how we affect—and are affected by—our relations with media technology. The author argues persuasively that the increased awareness provided by this posthuman approach affords us a greater chance for reclaiming some of our agency and provides a sound foundation upon which we can then judge our media relations. This book will be an indispensable tool for educators in media literacy and media studies, as well as academics in philosophy of technology, media and communication studies, and the post-humanities.

Leading authority on media literacy education shows secondary teachers how to incorporate media literacy into the curriculum, teach 21st-century skills, and select meaningful texts.

With the current ubiquity of technological tools and digital media, having the skillset necessary to use and understand digital media is essential. Integrating media literacy into modern day education can cultivate a stronger relationship between technology, educators, as well as students. The Handbook of Research on Media Literacy in the Digital Age presents key research in the field of digital media literacy with a specific emphasis on the need for pre-service and in-service educators to become familiar and comfortable with the current digital tools and applications that are an essential part of youth culture. Presenting pedagogical strategies as well as practical research and applications of digital media in various aspects of culture, society, and education, this publication is an ideal reference source for researchers, educators, graduate-level students, and media specialists.

In a world of media saturation, children today are not future consumers of information and goods, but targeted participants involved in a game in which they don’t know the rules or even that they are playing, yet one that will affect them throughout their lives. This teaching manual will help educators to not only introduce the concepts of economics, financial literacy, and media literacy to elementary students but supplies lessons designed to provide hands-on experiences recognizing, deconstructing, evaluating, and choosing for themselves whether to accept the tangible product or intangible message offered. The lessons help students to build a toolbox of analytical skills that they can carry with them and develop further throughout the rest of their lives to distinguish information from persuasion, from what people tell them they should believe to what the students, through critical thinking, decide is worthy of their belief.