Since the end of the twentieth century, the global media environment has been dramatically transformed. A whole range of new media technologies, forms and practices has emerged. Media users have been presented with new opportunities for self-expression and communication. However, in the process, media companies have also greatly enhanced their ability to gather, analyse and sell data about their customers. New media have by no means replaced older media, but the boundaries between public and interpersonal communication have become increasingly blurred: we live in a world of almost total mediation. New challenges have emerged, for example in relation to ‘fake news’, online abuse and threats to privacy; while older concerns – for example about propaganda, pornography and media ‘addiction’ – have taken on new forms. The global media environment is now dominated by a very small number of nearmonopoly providers, who control the most widely used media platforms and services.

In this context, policymakers are increasingly looking to media literacy as a means of maximizing the benefits of these new media, while also addressing some of the problems they pose. The media are a central dimension of contemporary life – of culture, of politics, of the economy and of personal relationships. Most people would agree that in an intensively mediated society, media users need to become more autonomous, more competent and more critical. Yet in many cases, media literacy seems to be regarded as a kind of quick-fix solution, or used as a way of shuffling off responsibility from the state to the individual. At least in the wider public debate, there is only a limited sense of what media literacy might entail, and how it might best be developed.

In many parts of the world, media educators have been dealing with these kinds of issues for decades – although, for various reasons, media education has generally remained at the margins of compulsory schooling. However, the media education curriculum, and many of the pedagogic strategies that media educators use, were mostly developed in the age of older ‘mass’ media. Some have argued that, in the digital age, media education is effectively redundant: they believe that young people will automatically develop the skills and understanding they need, simply by engaging in the so-called ‘participatory culture’ of social media.¹ Some have even suggested that critical approaches to media education are merely old-fashioned and patronizing.

My view is quite different. I do not share the rather facile optimism about the empowering potential of digital media. Nor do I believe that critical understanding will follow automatically from the experience of creative production or participation. Media literacy is not simply a matter of knowing how to use particular devices, whether in order to access or to create media messages. It must also entail an in-depth critical understanding of how these media work, how they communicate, how they represent the world, and how they are produced and used. Understanding the media today requires us to recognize the complexity of modern forms of ‘digital capitalism’. And if we really want citizens to be media literate, we need comprehensive, systematic and sustained programmes of media education as a basic entitlement for all young people.

As I see it, a manifesto should do two main things. First, it has to convince the reader of the importance and urgency of the task at hand. In doing so, it needs to lay out some basic aims and principles, and persuade the reader that these are more valid and useful than any potential alternatives. This is essentially the purpose of the first half of this book. Second, a manifesto has to provide a plan of action: it has to show how these aims might be carried through, not in abstract terms, but under actually existing conditions. This calls for rather less general assertion, and rather more detailed proposals. This is the purpose of the second half of the book.

Inevitably, my arguments here are based primarily on my own experience in the UK over the past several decades. Some of them may be hard to transfer to other contexts. However, the UK approach to media education has been highly influential worldwide; and I have worked with media educators in more than thirty different countries. My main focus is on media education in schools, rather than universities or more informal settings, although inevitably there is some overlap here; and my emphasis is thus primarily on children and young people rather than adults. I look at media broadly, to include both new digital media and older media (including print), although much of my argument is oriented towards the internet and social media.

This manifesto was written in 2018, at a point where the public debate about digital media seemed to have reached a tipping point. In retrospect, that year might come to be seen as the year of the ‘techlash’.² Critics of the global media companies – and indeed of the influence of digital media more broadly – have become significantly more vocal and prominent. It is striking to note how many executives and former executives of these companies are now expressing concern about the impact of these media – not least on their own children. Barely a week goes by without the publication of yet another book telling us how technology is taking us all to hell. Euphoric claims about the positive, empowering potential of digital media, which used to be stock-in-trade not only for corporate public relations but also for many scholars, educators and activists, have increasingly come to seem like empty rhetoric. When Mark Zuckerberg,³ the CEO of Facebook, tells a US Congress committee that his company is all about creating ‘community’ and ‘bringing the world closer together’, it hard to imagine that many people still believe him.

A critical understanding of the contemporary media environment certainly requires a degree of scepticism about such claims. However, we also need to beware the dangers of cynicism. These new media companies exercise considerable power, and much of what they do is obscure and invisible. Yet there are also limits to that power, and there are ways in which users can challenge it. Critical understanding is at least a first step in this process, and it is not an easy one. It demands in-depth knowledge, rigorous analysis and careful study; it requires us to reflect on our personal uses of these media, and our emotional and symbolic investments in them; and it entails a broader awareness of how media relate to more general social, cultural, political and historical developments. Yet ultimately, critical understanding also needs to lead to action: as the author of a somewhat more famous manifesto once said, the aim is not merely to interpret the world, but also to change it.