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The notion of media literacy emerged comparatively recently, in the 1990s, after society realized the role of media in public and personal life. The term combined the concept of media developed in communication studies courses since the 1960s and the idea of literacy—the skill to write and read, valued by humans for millennia.
This legacy of reading affected the concept: Media literacy has been seen as teaching the skills of understanding the true meaning behind the words, be that the words in newspapers, TV, ads or, lately, on social media. In the meantime, media have developed from being mere tools to becoming a virtual environment—no longer just enabling reading news or watching movies, but encompassing many of our activities. As a result, the old concept of media literacy is becoming obsolete.
Reading used to occupy one to two hours of an individual’s day on average, and television, up to four hours. Now, media consumption takes up 12 hours per day. Indeed, for the majority of modern urbanites, media consumption is a daylong activity that has merged with all other activities, including work, education, socialization and entertainment. Media literacy should evolve accordingly—not as an instruction manual for the better use of some technologies, but as a survival guide.
Here are seven hard-and-fast rules of this new media literacy for the digital age:
1. Media Literacy Is Cooperation With the Inevitable
Any medium, when used by a person, is a mere tool. But when used by many, a medium turns into a force that can reshape the environment. For example, a fence used by an individual is a technology that protects the owner’s yard or harvest. But when fences become more widely used, they turn into an environmental force that reshapes a nomadic culture into a sedentary and eventually urban one, affecting landscape and lifestyle.
Increasingly, we sense our environment through our media. Modern urban dwellers do not experience much of the natural environment directly. While mediating our experience with the environment, the media themselves become the environment.
Distinguishing the use of media as tools and the effects of media as environments is the starting point for media literacy. People can use an instrument at will, but an environmental force is hardly available for manipulation. We cannot control the environment in the same way we control tools. When in the 5th century B.C. the Persian king Xerxes built a bridge across the Dardanelles to attack the Greeks, a storm destroyed it. The king ordered his army to punish the sea by lashing it, thus manifesting his authority over the sea. The sea, however, remained indifferent. But at least Xerxes made it into history.
When a successful medium acquires the property of an environmental force, it behaves like an environment, like the sea, granting humans very limited opportunities to affect it—or granting no opportunities at all.
Speaking of the sea: To describe our relations with the media environment, media theorist Marshall McLuhan used a metaphor borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841). A fishing boat with three brothers was drawn into a mile-wide maelstrom. One brother was swept away by waves. Another was paralyzed by horror. But the third watched the terrifying spectacle as a manifestation of God’s might and was amazed by its structure, observing the whirling walls of water with awe and curiosity. Suddenly, he noticed that some debris remained afloat in the descending waters. He abandoned the boat and clung to some of that debris—a barrel. As time passed, the whirlpool subsided, and the sailor was rescued by another boat.
As McLuhan explained, “Sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. … It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth.”
Much like in this sailor’s story, as McLuhan suggests, understanding media relies on detached observation and pattern recognition. Cooperation with the inevitable is the only prospective course of action when the forces of media gain the might of a maelstrom. Media literacy distinguishes what we do with media from what media do to us. The former is instrumental use, while the latter is an environmental force. No modern King Xerxes can change the media maelstrom, but it is still possible to affect how we are dragged into it.
2. Media Literacy Is Internet Hygiene
The myth of the internet as a giant dump is only half right. It is a dump in the sense that everybody dumps their stuff there. However, far from everything gets delivered to and consumed by the end user. In reality, three thick layers of filters sift internet content and efficiently protect us from internet rubbish: personal settings, the viral editor and relevance algorithms.
With personal settings—such as adding a bookmark or a friend—users claim their digital territory and make it a home place with familiar routes and people. Since these routes and people have been personally picked and tested, they create highly reliable digital surroundings for each user.
The viral editor [ [link removed] ] represents the collective efforts of internet users. It is a sort of artificial intelligence powered by people rather than semiconductors. If a user sees something noteworthy, he or she shares it in hopes of eliciting a response, the currency of social capital. If others find it interesting, they share, too, and viral distribution begins. In the process, all participants decide what to select, add, remove; how to comment, illustrate and enhance. They all micro-edit content on the fly through viral distribution—hence the viral editor.
The viral editor not only handles the selection, framing and distribution but also serves as an ongoing referendum on significance. Through comments, likes and reposts, people vote on the importance of content, creating the largest machine of direct democracy in history. The viral editor turns something that is noteworthy for one into something newsworthy for many. In doing so, it has killed journalism by making superfluous journalism’s role as an information gatekeeper.
It recruits all the expertise, evidence and wit people possess, as they all compete for recognition while sharing. Each user’s network of digital friends consists of people with close social demographics and tastes. This ensures the high relevance of the information exchanged. The viral editor delivers content precisely to whom it may concern.
The third type of internet filters, the algorithms of relevance, analyze a user’s past clicks to determine what content a user will be exposed to in the future. The algorithms do that in order to improve the delivery of advertising. As a result, a user ends up in the prison of past preferences, but the convenience provided by this prison is enormous: It tailors content to our interests.
These three filters—personal bookmarks, the network of friends acting as the viral editor, and the algorithms of relevance—sift out 99.999…% of internet noise and deliver content with personal customization, unimaginable in any medium of any epoch. Understanding how these filters work leads to a conclusion that media literacy is the hygiene of clicks: Be careful to pick links, bookmarks and digital friends appropriately and with the awareness of consequences.
Digital media are designed to do an incredible job for you, with one purpose—to suck you in and keep you in. This, not any wrong or malicious content, is the major danger posed by digital media. Everything you need for efficient digital media literacy is already here. The only missing piece is you.
3. Media Literacy Is Authorship Management
The internet emancipated authorship [ [link removed] ]. In the entire history of human civilization before the internet, there was a total of roughly 300 million authors—people capable of expressing their thoughts or reactions beyond their physical reach. Now, in just 40 years, we have 5 billion authors. Everybody now has the technical capacity of authorship, but not all users, of course, have meaningful content to share. On average, 1% of users post, 9% comment, and 90% like, repost or simply scroll and pause.
In an age of near-universal authorship, most of us consistently or sporadically fall into one of the following categories of authors [ [link removed] ]:
Clicking authors: Their activity includes liking, reposting, clicking links or pausing while scrolling. These are still “authorial” and somewhat meaningful choices that define the significance of content and the speed of its distribution.
Interjectional authors: They contribute emotional affirmation through interjections (WOW, LOL, OMG) and their digital surrogates—emojis, gifs, memes and such. The level of exposure is higher, so they can count on a response (likes) to their activity.
Commenting authors: They produce the main mass of user-generated content. They are often highly combative, thus increasing drama and engagement for all.
Principal authors: They possess sufficient charisma and (sometimes) expertise to start public discussions.
In different situations and moods, a user can act as either a heavy or lazy author. The heavy authors (commenting and principal) contribute actual content. The lazy authors (clicking and interjectional) contribute activity and keep the machine rolling. The higher the activity, the more exposure—and the more social capital a user can accumulate.
Media literacy assumes the awareness of the spectrum of authorial opportunities and its benefits and risks. By posting, commenting, reposting or just liking, you decide the level of exposure for gaining both social capital and hate. Remember, though, that even pausing while scrolling represents personal choices and exposes you to the algorithms, so try not to get paranoid about it.
4. Media Literacy Is Fake Management
All accounts on social media are fakes. In the digital world, we all are legitimate con artists. Tribal life ensured that everyone’s behavior was exposed to others so that people could interact better and harmonize their lives within the tribe. Writing withdrew individuals from this collective immersion and allowed them to expose ideas, not behavior. Digital media have hybridized these two states. On social media, users exhibit their behavior to others, but it’s no longer the behavior of a real person. This is digital behavior, created by a user for his or her digital persona according to the settings of a social media platform.
In physical reality, our capacities for embellishing ourselves—faking our personalities—are quite limited. In writing, creating a fictional personality requires outstanding talent. By contrast, digital media are directly designed to fabricate our desirable personalities in the hope of eliciting a better response—by gaining more likes, comments and followers—and more social capital. By allowing our alternative and presumably better digital selves, social media fulfills the highest need in psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [ [link removed] ]—self-actualization. Everyone does it; some do it skillfully, also faking news posts and other activities with the same purpose—to elicit a better response and bring about gains in socialization or spreading ideas.
In physical reality, truths were verified by clashes with solid objects, and people’s wrong actions were punished by physical consequences. In digital reality, the only solid objects are others and algorithms. Truth is everything that complies with others and algorithms. Digital media literacy is about faking the self appropriately and having the awareness of others faking themselves. Digital media literacy is well-measured fake tolerance.
The further development of digital media, with textual generative AI, visual generative AI and, soon, behavioral generative AI, will only extend these marvelous digital capacities of remodeling the self.
5. Media Literacy Is Hormonal Therapy
Digital consumption is a hormone-driven activity. Smartphones and digital platforms exploit hormonal stimuli developed in humans by evolution. Curiosity is a beneficial trait because it increases the chances for finding food and shelter or mating. Socialization is a beneficial strategy because it improves interaction and tribal integrity, for survival and procreation. Nature rewards curiosity and socialization with cocktails of dopamine, serotonin and other pleasure-inducing hormones. Digital media have learned to exploit these survival mechanisms, making users digital hunter-gatherers, united in tribes.
These hormonal hits are tiny; they are barely sensed. Unlike the strong hormonal rewards for sex and food, which aim for completion and result in satiation, the rewards for curiosity and socialization aim to maintain certain behavioral activity, not complete it. Unlike physical reality, where curiosity and socialization required effort, all it takes in digital reality is scrolling and clicking. Receiving quasi-pleasure but never satiation, we spend more and more time online. In digital media, this is a feature, not a bug.
This is where digital addiction comes from. It’s not even pleasure itself but the yearning to experience that fleeting pleasure again and again that drives people to check their feed in the hope of seeing a like or to find and share something valuable with others, potentially leading to a response. Media literacy implies the awareness of the hormonal nature of digital consumption. The solutions aren’t withdrawal or self-shaming, but recognition, acceptance and balancing. Reasonable people can recognize and cope with guilty pleasures; this is simply another one.
The best way of not doing something is doing something else, preferably with a similar degree of excitement. It is hard to resist digital seduction, but one solution is to engage in other activities, such as sports, hobbies and all kinds of live interactions with others, so that they compete with digital devices for your time.
“Dopamine culture” is on the rise. The hormonal nature of digital consumption needs to be taken into account when exploring digital business opportunities, assessing digital threats to a healthy lifestyle, or searching for solutions to digital addiction.
6. Media Literacy Is Prompt Literacy
Focusing on finding answers was the Stone Age of the internet. Now the platforms want to know the questions, and they are getting better at it. Despite humans still mocking algorithms for stupid guesses, the algorithms can predict your impulsive or hidden desires with remarkable accuracy.
Since media platforms are aimed at service and profit, their capacity of predicting preferences ultimately results in inducing preferences. Either you know what you want from the media environment, or the media environment will make you want what it wants you to want. This is all fine as long as you are aware of it: Shaping your wants is actually one of the biggest services that the media environment provides.
The problem with the platform algorithms guessing our wants is that they often take over our lives. In the digital world, the platform convenience enslaves because this convenience is produced by the algorithms that learn our preferences, try to predict our preferences and eventually seek to induce our preferences. Similar to psychoanalysis, realization of your digital needs, whatever they may be, helps you acquire awareness of them and regain control over them.
Control over queries has worsened with the arrival of generative AI. While humans still can retain some agency over the questions, answers already belong to various digital entities—databases, search engines, relevance algorithms and generative AIs.
With the rise of generative AI that handles various human activities, prompt literacy [ [link removed] ]—the ability to accurately ask specific and detailed questions—is becoming the fundamental aspect of digital media literacy. After integrating AI with the internet of things and smart homes, prompt literacy will become the key not only for convenience, but also for safety and survival. Everyone will have to be prompt-competent in communicating with virtual assistants, smart cars and smart houses so that those assistants, cars and houses do not make one bankrupt, ruin careers and personal lives through communication errors, or worse, accidently kill their user.
7. Media Literacy Is Time Management
Traditional media literacy programs inherited from classical education the ethos of teaching how to do. This is logical when you deal with an instrument—you need to learn how to use it. However, when media are the environment, media literacy should be anti-environmental—it should teach how not to do.
No one teaches a person how to breathe—it comes naturally. But some practices of regaining control over your body (such as yoga or tai chi) teach how not to breathe. When a medium is not a mere tool, such as a sword or a car, but a virtual environment in which our life is immersed, such as the internet, there is no need to learn how to use it as an “instrument.” Media designers ensure that you will master necessary skills needed to use digital devices on the fly. But not using devices when everybody else does requires some spiritual guidance or even enforcement (through disciplinary measures—for example, by parents, in classrooms or on digital-detox retreats).
Media literacy is about comprehending, appreciating and withstanding the environmental power of media. Media literacy is the skill and discipline of switching between media and, ultimately, of willingly turning off any medium, no matter how emotionally attractive and sensorially pleasing it may be.
In the digital environment, media literacy is not about how to use media; it’s about how not to use media. Digital media literacy is meant to allow you to develop the discipline to resist instant reward for tiny effort and enjoy delayed gratification for significant effort. Digital media literacy is life (time) management.

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