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Across Europe and beyond, the promotion of media literacy for both children and adults has acquired an important public urgency. Citizens need to be media literate; it is claimed, to enable them to cope more effectively with the flood of information in today's highly mediated societies. As teachers, politicians, and policy makers everywhere struggle with this rapid shift in media culture, greater responsibility is placed on citizens for their own welfare in the new-media environment. This chapter focuses on how media literacy might be achieved. First, it examines how media literacy has been defined, with particular reference to the growing importance of digital literacy. Second, the chapter examines how media literacy has been adopted within policy frameworks as a response to rapid technological change. Third, the chapter critiques the ‘technological literacy’ that dominates much of the current policy agenda, and argues for a new approach based on better knowledge about children and young people's media and internet habits.

Electrical professionals were the ambitious catalysts of an industrial shift from steam to electricity taking place in the United States and Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Thomas P. Hughes, Alfred Chandler, and others, that shift was made possible by key inventions in power, transportation, and communication, and by managerial innovations based on them that helped rescale traditional systems of production and distribution. The retooling of American industry fostered a new class of managers of machines and techniques; prominent among them were electrical professionals. The transformation in which these professionals participated was no class revolution, as David Noble has pointed out. Their job was to engineer, promote, improve, maintain, and repair the emerging technical infrastructure in the image of an existing distribution of power. Their ranks included scientists, whose attention was directed to increasingly esoteric phenomena requiring ever more specialized intellectual tools and formal training, electrical engineers, and other “electricians” forging their own new identity from an older one of practical tinkerer and craft worker. Servingmaid to both groups were cadres of operatives from machine tenders to telegraph operators, striving to attach themselves as firmly as possible to this new and highly visible priesthood. Electrical experts before 1900 were acutely conscious of their lack of status in American society relative to other professional groups. The American Institute for Electrical Engineers (AIEE), founded early in 1884, was the last of the major engineering societies to be organized in the nineteenth century. Professional societies had already been organized by civil engineers in 1852, mining engineers in 1871, and mechanical engineers in 1880. The prestige of other groups in the engineering fraternity, especially civil and mechanical engineers, came less from membership in professional societies, however, than from other circumstances. Their practitioners hailed from the upper and middle strata of society, were often products of classical education, and had developed distinctive professional cultures of their own well before the formation of their national organizations. This gave them an established and even aristocratic niche in society.

In any culture codes for bodily communication are conventionally elaborated and, like other codes, require skillful manipulation. The body is the most familiar of all communicative modes, as well as the sensible center of human experience, which lives or dies with it. Upon it, all other codes are inscribed to a greater or lesser extent. There is no form of communication that does not require the body's engagement, though printed and written messages may involve a smaller direct range of its perceptual and motor capacities than oral-gestural messages do. In addition, strange experiences are often translated and made familiar by comparisons with the body, and by categories of classification derived from the body's experience. The body is a convenient touchstone by which to gauge, explore, and interpret the unfamiliar, an essential information-gathering probe we never quite give up, no matter how sophisticated the supplemental modes available to us. The body is also squarely at the critical juncture between nature and culture. It is nature, or in any case man's most direct link to nature, capable of opposing and resisting it at least for a while, either its own or that external to it. The inscription of cultural codes upon the body is perhaps the principal means of detaching it from nature and transforming it into culture. The body and its actions, therefore, have a richly ambiguous social meaning. They can be made to emphasize perceived distinctions between nature or culture as the need arises, or to reconcile them. Because men use what is known to them to make sense of what is not, a deep inquisitiveness about the relationship between electricity and the human body was part of the process of becoming socially acquainted with that novel and mysterious force in the late nineteenth century. And though electricity might be discussed either as an extension of nature or of the body, or as something opposed to and outside them, it was defined in any case inescapably with reference to them.