Media Literacy in the Ecosystem: After McLuhan

This essay includes, and adds to, an adapted set of extracts from Media Literacy for the Communication Ecosystem: A Theory of Change for a Healthier Future (Springer, 2025). 

You are in Canada, but you could be anywhere. But you are not familiar with Marshall McLuhan at this point. For whatever reason, perhaps in an educational context, perhaps through enthusiasm for board games, perhaps for another reason, you play a board game called The MediuM, which is based on McLuhan’s Laws of Media. The game presents a wide variety of old and new media and you use the laws of media to give clues to teammates. The idea is that you become aware of the media environment by recognizing its unintended and invisible functions and/or implications and think laterally about how technology determines society and—especially—how we cannot be separated from the technology with which we engage. Through playing the game, you use critical thinking skills to assess (technological aspects of) how media texts and / or artefacts and information sources are constructed and to develop understanding of (technology in) the ecosystem. Learning is manifest if you play the game successfully, as you need media literacy to succeed. Whether this is consequential is highly speculative. 

You are a Canadian child who goes on a Community Walk for the Environment as Media intervention. This is a strategy your teachers have adopted to apply Marshall McLuhan’s notion of “figure and ground” to your everyday environments to ask “how might understanding environment-as-media inspire play, and support children’s agency and sense of belonging?” In this intervention architecture, urban design, traffic signage – all human-made artefacts and environments – are treated as media containing ideological and social messages – and then nudges you to question how this environment relates to and supports your agency and sense of belonging. This is a distinct awareness shift in terms of how you apply change markers to a new sense of what media are – a different way to think more critically about media representations and / or practices and a different kind of space for dialogue with family / carers and / or friends and peers about mediation affecting individuals, social groups and communities.  Change is manifest in you ‘walking the walk’, with the longer term consequences of this being entirely provisional. 

You are a media literacy educator, anywhere on Earth, facilitating Medium frame workshops – to enable students to stand outside of algorithms, using McLuhan ideas to help students focus on a particular part of society with an awareness of their own gaze. This idea encourages students to become autonomously aware of the surrounding environment; to counter algorithmic pattern recognition and stereotyped ways of thinking; to become more mindful in their engagement with and / or their sharing of media and data.    

These three scenarios are from the 400 impactful recent media literacy interventions which were identified from across the world, using a theory of change for the difference media literacy makes to people’s lives (McDougall, 2025).  These three cases speak directly to McLuhan’s influence. More broadly, the entire project motivates media literacy for ecosystem change. Such a way of seeing media literacy is clearly informed by McLuhan’s thinking about media as environment and media, technology, people and culture in a dynamic ecological relation. 

Ecosystem thinking

The way we are thinking about making a difference with media literacy in this project is through the lens of a communication ecosystem which is more or less healthy. So we are thinking about the ways in which media literacy can improve the health of this ecosystem.

In the UK, nature writer Mark Cocker (2024) concluded his book about the migration of Swifts with a four page single sentence to describe the rapidly increasing toxicity of the natural environment, how our species has done this, and yet – how the transient and fleeting presence of Swifts in our environment is reason for hope, if only we can look up. 

The communication ecosystem is no less polluted. And yet, also—if the field of media literacy were bolder about what we can change, more credible in generating evidence, more accepting of the limits of our powers, but also more focussed on social justice, more eco-centric and epistemologically diverse—to then be more ambitious for incremental, collaborative impact, perhaps Cocker’s reassurance can resonate: ‘Together, we are hope’ (2023, p.273). To this we shall return. 

The communication ecosystem is a dynamic ecology of networks, actors, relationships, processes and structures. It is a complex and fluid intersection of citizens, media producers and information providers, platforms, regulators and cultural, legal and political influences. 

This analogy works in the communication ecosystem resembling an environment in which organisms interact with the system and with each other. The organisms in question are in complex socio-material relations. In a communication ecosystem, energy flows in the form of an economy of attention between people, technology, organisations and the digital environment. These attentive relations are happening in the broader contexts of socio-cultural and geo-political structures and events.  

Dynamic Relations 

The communication ecosystem describes the full range of media content and information distributed in the digital environment. It is a dynamic system of relations. It is useful to think about how we access, engage with and share media and information this way because it helps us to see the ways in which structure and agency work. In an ecosystem, professional media, content and information providers coexist with citizens. These citizens can be, if they so wish, only audience members, or they can take agency with how they publicly respond to, share, and modify what they access. They can also be producers and providers of content and information themselves. An ecosystem also includes institutions that regulate media and information, and of course governments. However, a communication ecosystem extends beyond national borders, mitigating the influence of state power. On the other hand, a company may use the ecosystem metaphor to generate their own communications strategy (see BBC Media Action, 2021) In this project, we are concerned with a) the communication ecosystem a citizen is inhabiting, b) how healthy it is and c) the role of media literacy in making it healthier: 

We have always used and relied on media to experience, express and comprehend our humanity, and it is up to us to take responsibility for the world we want in media. (Deuze, 2023, p.18) 

An ecosystem approach is helpful because of the situation Deuze observes: that we are always-already living a ‘life in media’ now. We no longer commit particular time to engaging with media as a discrete activity or to accessing information online. Rather, these practices are deeply embedded in our everyday lived experience. Just as the health of the natural environment makes a difference to our physical wellbeing, the health of the communication ecosystem we inhabit influences the quality of our lives. 

As we are now living in ‘postdigital’ life, whereby the digital is only present when absent, like air or water, we can understand that media literacy comes to be about “the consequences of the digital, for diversity & the challenges of living together, after the digital.” (Pasta & Zoletti, 2023). This literacy, then, is not a solution, but a process of change. 

“When communication ecosystems are unhealthy, the populations they serve face multiple crises. This is not an exhaustive list, but the main areas of concern include: A lack of viable economic models; the capture of media by political or economic actors; low levels of public trust; polarisation of views; decline in media freedom and lack of equity, diversity and inclusion in the media. (BBC Media Action, 2021, p.3).

This essay and the broader project it summarises assert a necessity to surpass McLuhan to improve the health of our communication ecosystem, with and through media literacy, just as we need to take actions to reduce climate change. Crucially, to signpost climate change here is not merely a neat analogy, because there is compelling evidence that health and science misinformation are key elements in people’s inertia to the toxic natural environment. Therefore, the health of natural ecosystems and communication ecosystems are closely linked: 

“A perfectly healthy communication ecosystem is one that is never achieved but that is always strived for.  It is necessarily human, where solidarity, care, reciprocity, and love are prioritized. When criticality, difference, and diversity shine. It is healthy when community is seen, felt and heard. It is healthy when it focuses on relationships. To strive for healthy communication ecosystems is to strive for ecosystems that are connected to our physical communities, free from actors that intend to exploit, to commodify, and to extract. They support equitable representation for public life to thrive, and they do with a mix of forms of engagement, oversight, and shared principles.” (Paul Mihailidis, direct contribution to this project, 2024) 

Scolari’s articulation (2022) of a theory of media evolution which is itself a ‘proto-discipline’ begins to foreground energy flows rather than form, content and medium. Media both create an environment which surrounds us, which we inhabit, but also create relations between media. Crucially, this holistic framework can account for both ecology and evolution, spatial (synchronic) and temporal (diachronic) perspectives, and also moving between the study of the singular device and the transformations to which they contribute … “ … in the same way that Charles Darwin needed to collect fossils to build his grand theoretical framework, the media evolutionist must often work with media fossils that are located at the micro perspective level.” (Scolari, 2022, p.18).

The ecological study of communication ecosystems and our engagement with media as holistic and sensory is commonly traced back to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’, casting a scholarly lens on “complex communication systems as environments” (Nystrom, 1973: 1). We can see a similar ‘paradigm shift’ here, as with Tansley, proposing our engagement with communication, media and information as relational and dynamic. This communication environment is not something we enter and exit, but rather inhabit, and our thinking and perceptions happen within it. Media interact dynamically with one another in this environment, like species and elements within an ecosystem (McLuhan, 2003, Scolari, 2022). The media ecology field is essential for media literacy because it dispels the latter’s historically problematic deficit and measuring approaches to how a person uses media in isolation from the rest of lived experience, alongside its focus on how developments in media are interdependent on other advances, for example in transport, economics or urban generation. 

The argument for looking at communication today, in our ever more complex, platformed and hyper-digital media lives, through this ecosystem approach, is compellingly made by Zuckerman (2021), evoking, again, Tansley’s intervention: 

This need to understand media holistically, particularly through analysis of flows from one part of an ecosystem to another, may ultimately result in a Tansleyian shift in media. In particular, while we will and should continue to study individual species – Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, broadcast television, talk radio – we also need to study them in the context of ‘the habitat factors in the widest sense’ to understand their effects on social movements and political parties. (2021: 1503)

In the third sector, non-profit organisations such as the Media Ecosystems Analysis Group adopt the same broad framework, providing ecosystem research and ‘leveraging insights towards social change, public health, and human rights agendas’. (MEAG, 2024). This is largely a diagnostic operation, generating robust evidence of trends and patterns in the ecosystem, so that this evidence can be used for positive change, through detection and prevention or counter-strategy.   

The boundaries of the communication ecosystem bring to the surface an important tension. For media literacy, it is increasingly crucial to be more precise about what change can be enabled and where the external factors are too strong for impact. For the communication ecosystem, the question is about the relationship between media, information and geo-politics. This is similar to the Japanese concept of the “media biotope,” “in which people collaborate with others in their homes, communities, schools, workplaces, and online communities. People can become more resilient and secure their own identities and communities by engaging with the media biotope with a do-it-yourself mentality.” (Mizukoshi, 2021: 1). 

After the Media, After McLuhan 

To essentialise or universalise communication in the interests of a coherent metaphor is counter-productive to the intentions of media literacy for social change. In the communication ecosystem, communication is always in flux and a site of struggle, and the relative health of the ecosystem is also about the shift from appropriation of communication to communicative equality and respect for difference so that the ecosystem—in full health overall—promotes diversity in the pursuit of social justice: 

In indigenous communities, there is the notion of one’s own communication and one’s appropriated communication. We need to be able to take this into other areas of our lives: those things that are true to us, to our hearts, to our practices, that allow us to be community and be in community; as well as those things that we need to appropriate. But of course, we should have a critical perspective of those things we need to appropriate in order to appropriate them while subverting them. (Magallenes- Blanco, in Suzina – Tufte, 2022: 70) 

When ‘Global North’ media literacy scholars (like this author) are seeking to use theories of change like the one the Suzina – Tufte book presents—to simultaneously position media literacy as essential for a healthier future and unsettle the media literacy field—is a challenging epistemological project. For the future trajectory of media ecology, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun moves us ‘After McLuhan’ “to weave and spin outside the Eurocentric mirror, to follow wires and miss files, to punch through indices and stand on platforms. To shelter by refusing and by fabricating. Because after is not less. Rather, to come after is to change what remains in store for the future.”  (2022, p.225). 

This ‘after’ is important. When the media ecology field and the media literacy community use the ecosystem metaphor to imagine ‘the media’ as an actual place, this is self-defeating. It resonates with the ‘After the Media’ provocation which formed part of the trajectory to this project (Bennett, Kendall and McDougall, 2011) and is also pertinent to Lopez’s critique of ‘medialandia’ (2023) and, again, in the PostDigital (Pasta & Zoletti, 2024). By ‘after the media’, we did not posit a temporal shift, we were not arguing that ‘the media’ had ceased to be. Instead, we conceived of this as akin to the postmodern – a way of thinking ‘after’ or ‘awry’ – that resists recourse to the idea of ‘the media’ as external to media literate agents in social practice. ‘The media’, as more than merely a technical grammatical plural, is constructed out of a need to preserve a status outside of it, to maintain it as other, consistent with a version of media literacy for which there exists ‘the media’ to be literate about. We proposed, over a decade ago, that new digital media had created a visible space for what was already happening in between people and media – and hence we could see more clearly then what was always-already, but less observably, there, since: 

Even if you don’t accept the ecological metaphor, there’s no doubt that our emerging information environment is more complex – in terms of numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and the pace of change – than anything that has gone before (Naughton, 2010: 10). 

We observed, back then, in the clamour for, arguments about, and subsequent disappointment over, ‘Media 2.0”, a new desire for doing critical media literacy in that changing landscape, and we suggested that the exclusive categories of teacher / student could not be challenged without doing the same to media / audience: 

The incomplete project of critical media literacy can be resurrected through the formulation of new ‘local’ rules and microstrategies for learning about how textual experience – but not ‘the media’ is part of making sense of ourselves and how we might be together. (Kendall and McDougall, 2011:28) 

This is about the communication ecosystem approach departing from situating humans and media as distinct, through an anthropocentric lens on the ecosystem and a human-centred motivation for its health, for our survival. The way we are thinking now makes less, if any, distinction between human, media, machine or between nature / technology and is focussed less on ecosystem balance than on how power is exercised. It is environmental in the sense Karen Fry describes, as an intersect of context, content, power and paradigm, always differently inter-related in geo-cultural context “in the impulse to “understand the whole environment of possibility.” (2022: 157)

McLuhan’s metaphorical legacy must be problematised for other reasons. Firstly, feminist scholars draw attention to the frequent othering, misogyny and racism in his writing, whilst still seeking to reutilise his theoretical contributions for current concerns. Secondly, the tendency among the ‘McLuhan school’ to ‘faithfully’ project his imagined thinking onto the contemporary communication ecosystem essentialises people and machines in profoundly unhelpful ways:  

Much of the extension of McLuhan’s theories to the digital age interpret his notion that media determine culture as a singular affect upon the same singular universal human subject McLuhan was concerned with. Such a view parallels the dangerous and uncritical view of technology espoused by Elon Musk and is evidenced by the Tech-Bro culture of Silicon Valley, who remain wilfully blind to the realities of the uneven technological futures they are increasingly responsible for. (Sharma, 2020: 4) 

At the same time, media scholars have learned from history that threshold moments in technological advancement are typically categorised by a seismic breakthrough (social media, web 2.0, the smartphone, artificial intelligence); followed by rapid technological developments and ‘pioneer competition’ fuelling huge investments, followed by market saturation and a period of incremental enhancements, before the next threshold.  

When thinking about the communication ecosystem and about media literacy, both after the media and after McLuhan, often this thinking works with ideas from Deleuze and Guattari (1993) and is thus considered to be ‘rhizomatic’ (a non-linear, decentralized, and interconnected structure or process that spreads in multiple directions without a fixed center or hierarchy). The difference in Deleuze’s thinking to McLuhan’s is useful for communication ecosystem analysis, most prominently in the shift from media as extension to assemblages of people, machines and other moving parts. The argument is that ‘the medium is the message’ was a contribution to this thinking, so they are not in conflict, but now we are understanding that these assemblages are the starting point and not a result of things in combination: 

When we understand humans as machinic assemblages, ‘I am watching TV’ no longer makes sense because TV is me in this moment. The person-remote-TV-couch assemblage is my mode of being, which means I am not in another mode of being. (Jenkins and Zhang, 2019: 60).  

Nothing comes prior to the assemblage, not a person, a machine, a medium, but also—making this very difficult—to acknowledge that the theoretical position we take is in itself an assemblage. For those seeking to adopt Deleuze’s theoretical approaches to studying communication ecosystems, this is an ethical position, as the motivation must be to understand – and act on – the ways in which we can be reflexive about the assemblages we plug into. This now extends to algorithms, which, using a broadly ecological approach, we need to understand as culture, as opposed to being distinct from culture, or in culture, or transforming culture. As assemblages, through the collective engaging practices of ‘ordinary people’ they are, then “part of culture, constituted not only by rational procedures, but by institutions, people, intersecting contexts, and the rough-and-ready sensemaking that obtains in ordinary cultural life.” (Seaver, 2017: 10) 

Turnbull et. al. categorise ways of thinking about this assemblage/digital ecology in terms of materialities, encounters and governance. This taxonomy locates the digital in assemblages, inequalities and political economies with both environmental and geopolitical consequences. In this way, we can use these ideas about ecologies and assemblages to assess “the interconnected potentials, politics, and responsibilities associated with the digitisation of more-than-human worlds.” (Turnbull et al, 2022: 5) 

Now and Next: Eco-centric | Epistemic Media Literacies

The agentive, change-making media literacy this project is seeking to identify, measure and extract best practice from is both dynamic and ecocentric. This ecocentric media literacy is in one sense about teaching and learning in media edu-cologies, ‘After McLuhan,’ in a ‘playground of praxis.’ However, this way of thinking about media literacy is also epistemologically reflexive and diverse. Indigenous media literacies and Global Majority perspectives are moving from the margins, so that the field can start to better understand how activism for social justice can be mobilised through g/local application of media literacy, intersecting with movements and counter-representations in and through new ‘media edu-cologies,’ a construction that captures a complex set of ecological and environmental concerns now at the very centre of the field. One is the climate crisis. The relationship between media literacy and climate change has been recently investigated by Lopez (2021). Here, ways of raising awareness of the relative health of media ecologies through media literacy converge with pedagogic approaches to fostering ‘slow media and slow looking’ (p240): ‘At its core, as opposed to functionalist competence models, ecomedia education should be grounded in co-ethics and co-citizenship.” (p249). Where the ecological is mediated, media constitute an ecosystem, and thus the second concern is that posed by our new socio-technical digital order, constructed through datafication, algorithms, surveillance structures and social media. Together these overlapping concerns demand understanding and action on an ecological scale, and in this context the field of media literacy has much to offer for responding to the rise of algorithmic cultures, disinformation and misinformation, information fog and warfare, and the representation of nature, race, ethnicity, indigeneity and various forms of difference. 

These more diverse cartographies move us to questions around how media literacy can decentre the field, a clear and present departure from binary, reductive solutionism but one that is against the grain of regulatory, protectionist or instrumentally educational imperatives. 

Gambino (2023) traces, primarily in the US, the developing opportunities from critical media literacy synergies for social and environmental justice: 

Several emerging models continue to reshape various approaches to critical media literacy. For example, trauma-informed critical media literacy approaches (Baker-Bell et al., 2017), Queer Critical Media Literacies Framework (Van Leent & Mills, 2018), Critical Race Media Literacy (Cubbage, 2023; Yosso, 2002, 2020), Ecomedia Literacy (López, 2020; López et al., 2023), Critical Social Literacy (Currie & Kelly, 2022a, 2022b), and Critical Algorithmic Literacy (Moss, 2022). Each of these frameworks espouse types of critical media education that engage a dialectical social critique of media and exercises countermedia productions to challenge how social systems, structures, and ideologies reproduce issues of ableism, classism, homophobia, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, and other forms of identity-based and environmental injustices, albeit with varying techniques and depth. Thus, following in similar fashion to Masterman’s (1985) and Freire’s (1970) perspectives to constantly evolve theories and practices that address systems of oppression in order to move forward towards more just and sustainable futures.

Melki also invokes Freire in calling for a “media literacy of the oppressed,” to acknowledge the gap in the field with regard to “other contexts, particularly fragile states that are experiencing chronic conflict, terrorism, war, migration, occupation, and a constant state of economic turmoil” (Melki 2018, p6). Cooke-Jackson wrestles with the challenges of “how to help my students hold in tandem the frustration or angst of what they might be experiencing in their day to day lives as persons who are racialized, gendered or living with disability, whilst simultaneously inhabiting their unique and specific positionalities, voice and agency. (2023: 60). 

Aside from the unhelpful solutionism we seek to move beyond, media literacy is evidently situated as at least part of what Giroux calls “the Necessity of Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times” (2024), through a reflection on his long friendship with Freire and the importance of his legacy today, since: 

…one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a language, discourse and pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading of both the word and the world in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people and provide the conditions for them to become critical agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, values, and civic courage that enables them to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society. (Giroux, 2024)

One of the most optimistic contributions to this Freirian legacy in these ‘dark times’ is made by Pablo Martinez-Zárate as ‘eccentric pedagogy,’ which “cares for the modalities of communication as the basis for pedagogical exchange” (2023: 138). One key aspect of eccentric pedagogy which resonates here is how it addresses the prevalence of fear in education, mirroring the ‘age of fear’ in which we live. This eccentricism is a strategy for liberation, from this fear, to transform fear into hope. Since media literacy solutionism is entirely a fearful endeavour, and since this book is an attempt to reposition the field as hopeful, then we take a great deal of inspiration from this idea for “pedagogy as a way of healing together and imagining new ways of coexisting among humans and more-than-humans.” (2023: 129)  

To offer a map of the intersection this all speaks to, we observe that media literacy in action (Hobbs 2021) for social justice (De Abreu 2023) is dynamic, living and unsettling (Potter – McDougall 2016; Pahl and Rowsell 2020; Lee et al 2022) and we observe this in ‘third space’ partnerships involving education, training, subcultural and community activity, activism and artivism. Understanding media literacy as deeply situated in cultural, geo-political and media ecosystem contexts seeks to avoid universal, ‘neutral’ solutionism and to understand tensions and nuances, such as the ways in which media literacy interventions in response to ‘information disorder’ relate to freedom of expression, civic agency and epistemological value systems. This intersection of media literacy and artivism is often realised in community media through a combination of action learning and indigenous epistemologies. 

Theory of Change 

To restate, the change we want this dynamic media literacy to make is to contribute to a vision of a healthy communication ecosystem. This ‘ideal world’ is rich, diverse, generative, eco-centric and rights-protecting. In this ecosystem, the people who inhabit it demand equal and diverse communications and safe online and data environments. Publics are motivated to “interrogate how the technology works, even when we are trying to accommodate it into our everyday lives.” (Natale, 2021, p.132). At the same time, in this healthy scenario, communication actors, platforms and technology designers act in the public interest for social good.  But this last element may be out of scope for media literacy, or it may be that media literacy can influence change in these domains, partially, incrementally. This is why we need a theory of change.  

A theory of change sets out to both explain and plan for a desired change in a particular context. Key components of a theory of change include assumptions; long-term goals; activities to move towards change; outputs from the activities and success measures or indicators to evaluate the extent of change achieved. In the context of media literacy, using a theory of change to clarify, understand, plan for and evaluate the difference media literacy makes to people’s lives is also in recognition that arts and media projects can struggle to evidence impact, and subsequently that “The adoption of a theory of change approach enables creative practice researchers to evidence aspirations or intentions just as well as concrete outcomes… and provides a language to narrate their stories and articulate value in terms they understand.” (Boulil and Hanney, 2022, p.127) 

This theory of change for media literacy is the culmination of a decade of research, following which the first version was created for BBC Media Action to map the impact of their work in fragile societies and diverse communities. The result was adapted and applied to projects with the British Council, and then as an over-arching framework for their activities in the media literacy space. That work is partly about communication ecosystem change for broader social justice and social cohesion objectives and partly as a specific response to the threats posed by mis, dis and mal-information. It became apparent, in the process of using this theory of change to evaluate the impact of such organisations’ interventions and to design future research, that it is sufficiently robust and adaptable to serve the global field of media literacy.

The next iteration of the theory of change was for the UK Government, in collaboration with Ofcom. This project evaluated the entire UK media literacy field for a decade, situating the impact of media literacy and being more accountable and precise about its limits. At the same time, the UK Media and Information Literacy Alliance became both a registered charity and the UK chapter of Unesco, and MILA also utilised the theory of change for their work in advocacy and capability building. The obvious next step was to apply the framework to the global field, in order to both claim with renewed conviction the difference media literacy makes to peoples’ lives and to be more nuanced and rigorous about what is beyond the remit of the field or the resources we have. Perhaps most importantly, working at the ‘dotted line’ threshold between latent evidence and manifest evidence can sharpen our design thinking when we start new research. So, it is very important to state that reporting a lack of evidence for the longitudinal consequences of media literacy does not mean that we don’t believe it is happening, only that we need to think harder about how to provide the proof. 

For each of the four inter-related change elements, a set of descriptors were generated.  Again, it is vital to state, these descriptors were generated from a decade of research evidence.

Access 

Media literacy enables people to have the means to be included as an individual in the full media, digital and information ecosystem, through digital connectivity, technological access and the skills to use the media and digital technology available to them. Access involves who, when, where and how often people have access to media content, information and digital technology, and whether they have the knowledge and awareness needed to use it in the ways they would like to, in the contexts of everyday life, citizenship, education, work and health. It also relates to how people make choices which restrict their own access to parts of the ecosystem. Functioning civic societies require a diverse and pluralist media ecosystem and citizens being literate enough to make informed choices about what to access within the ecosystem. 

Awareness 

Media literacy enables people to have an awareness and understanding of how media and information represent people, events, issues and places, and are able to assess this from a critical perspective. At a basic level, this may include understanding how media content and information represents people, places, news and issues from particular points of view with particular intentions, in the contexts of everyday life, citizenship, education, work and health. On a larger scale, it includes understanding how the media environment they are engaging with is constructed, for example in terms of how diverse it is, who owns or controls different media sources and how digital and social media is governed, designed and manipulated, the role of social media algorithms and general data literacy. Increasing awareness will support people to make more informed decisions about what media content and information sources they trust and engage with and to understand the role of media in a functioning civic society. 

Capability 

People use their media literacy (their access to media and information and their awareness of sources, representation, trustworthy content and the role of data and algorithms) more actively for particular purposes in their lives, rather than as passive consumers of information and content, in the contexts of everyday mediated life, citizenship, education, work and health. These purposes range from access changes, the application of more critical or mindful decision-making when receiving information, the use of fact-checking of information or sources, more informed attitudes to sharing content and information, or getting directly involved in the media ecosystem as creators of media content. Increases in media literacy can also lead to new capabilities for civic engagement through digital media and technology and increased employability through the gaining of creative and/or digital skills. When media literacy develops into capability, people can be more civically engaged and societies can function better. However, it is important to appreciate that increasing media literacy capability does not inherently lead to the positive uses of media literacy. There are many examples of how skills in using media and digital platforms can be used to do harm, for instance through the exploitation of children, through the creation of false or misleading information, the production of negative media representations of people and groups, the sharing of harmful content, commercial exploitation or actions which threaten civic society and equality. 

Consequences 

The distinction between capability and consequences can be subtle and nuanced, but it is about supporting positive uses of media literacy, informed not just by access and awareness of the role of media in society but also the recognition that one’s own individual actions and decisions in how media literacy is used impact the media ecosystem and society, in the contexts of everyday mediated life, citizenship, education, work and health. Focusing on how media literacy can contribute to significant change in this way encourages individuals to take media literacy actions that can make a constructive and positive impact on the media ecosystem and their lives and the lives of others in a functioning civic society. This may include taking action such as challenging misinformation and thus reducing the negative health consequences of being misled, producing media content and/or online information, sharing trustworthy content on social media, trying to increase the representation of people who are excluded or marginalised in the media or engaging in forms of data activism or even more critical and mindful non-action (e.g. not sharing misinformation, changing data settings). With this in mind, media literacy interventions should focus on how people (including the general population, children, particular ‘at risk’ groups, but also media practitioners) can not only develop, increase and use their media literacy to improve their lives but also to use their media literacy for positive change for everyone in the ecosystem, similar to taking positive action to improve the natural environment. 

Methodology 

For this project (McDougall, 2025), 400 media literacy interventions are mapped to the four theory of change domains, so an average of 100 for each. ‘Interventions’ describes research, projects and educational activities, anything where media literacy is used with the intention of creating change in people’s lives. The sampling and selection methodology was first developed for the UK government evaluation conducted in 2023. Deductive and collaborative efforts guided the development of the theory of change from the initial stages (Laing and Todd 2015; Belcher et al. 2020), through a pilot evaluation, refinements to the framework with feedback from critical friends that highlighted the need for more non-academic language, inclusion of projects from different sectors (e.g., health, educational, social, and political contexts), more coherent alignment with existing resources (e.g. those provided by Ofcom in the UK) and more guidance for ‘bottom up’ project developers entering the media literacy research field for the first time. Following adaptations from this feedback, the approach was pre-tested in the form of a standardisation exercise. The knowledge and experience from the pilot stage was then synthesised to establish the consistent approach which guided the final review of UK projects. 

Interventions included displaying clear intentions for media literacy to lead to positive change. The sampling frame is a) temporal (every intervention is from 2000 and beyond but the vast majority is from 2020 or later) and b) filtered – selecting activities with change objectives and either evidence of change of a clear pathway from potential.  The scope is generated through independent (keyword) searches and harnessing existing data sets from journals, conferences, dissemination of project outputs across networks and existing congruent reviews, with snowball sampling for further projects. 

Three pilot studies were conducted in which the theory of change was applied to samples of activity. Firstly, the theory of change was used to evaluate media literacy projects and activities in the UK over the last decade (funded by the UK Government and in collaboration with Ofcom, the Media and Information Literacy Alliance and Wikimedia UK). Secondly, a seminar series through which researchers from all over the world share their work at the intersection of media literacy, science, health and data communication formed a further interdisciplinary sample for mapping. Thirdly, one year’s outputs from an impactful journal in the field, the Journal of Media Literacy Education, and the most read research outputs from Europe, curated by Media and Learning, were both mapped to the theory of change.  

In the expansion of the project to the global field, the same sampling approach was adopted, but the evaluation of all examples selected beyond the UK review was the work of a sole author. That said, conviction in the rigour of the exercise is from the continuity from the triangulated UK work, being funded by and approved by a government department, in collaboration with a regulator and supported by critical review from a group of important critical partners. 

All of this is to provide confidence that the interventions included in the mapping, the findings generated from this, and the recommendations made for the field, are the result of a long-term, incremental process of design, trial, adaptation and testing. Whilst all work of this nature is subjective, and informed by predisposition and investment, bias and subjective desire, this is a robust research exercise.   

The theory of change can be used to evaluate any media literacy project, activity or educational programme and to aid the design of media literacy activities. Wherever media literacy is being developed, applied, used to solve a problem, to help people, to improve a situation or to make things better in society, this framework can help to more precisely identify the specific kinds of change a project intends to deliver.  Depending on where you are in your media literacy work, this might be about designing a completely new intervention, refining or extending something, or using this framework to evaluate change in new ways. To use this theory of change, we first use the 4 element descriptors to identify which aspect of media literacy the intended change will relate to within the communication ecosystem. 

Is it to do with people’s access to media?

Is it about their media awareness? 

Is it intending to help people use media literacy to extend their capabilities in their lives? 

Does it want to make a positive difference to society through the consequences of people’s media literacy? 

Often a media literacy project will create change in more than one of these areas, so it is not about only identifying which one element is relevant but looking across the elements to see where change can happen. This framework is also flexible so we can identify change, see the potential for change and also include both manifest and latent change.  

When you have identified the change elements which the media literacy project or activity can achieve, then move to the change objectives table and identify which of the specific change impacts can be evidenced or where the potential for change is apparent – for example, new kinds of knowledge developed by people taking part in the activities, or people doing things differently in their lives, and how these changes are related to their access, awareness, capability or the consequences of their media literacy.   

Everything you need is here – https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/projects/evaluating-media-literacy-theory-change and an interactive map which plots all 400 activities by location and theme can be found here – www.ml-eco.net. You can also add your project to the map. 

Findings 

This project mapped 400 media literacy interventions from all over the world in recent years to a theory of change. The sample size of 400 was chosen in order to map an average of 100 interventions per domain, but not to skew the sample to 100 each, since that would impede the aim to map the field to the theory of change in terms of the collective weighting of impact in each area. Across this sample of 400 media literacy interventions, 31% changed things for people most evidently in relation to their media access, 22% made the biggest difference to their media awareness, 40.5% converted media literacy into capabilities and 6.5% really created change beyond the intervention, as consequential media literacy work. Of the 40.5 mapped to capability, 28 were identified at the threshold to consequences, so this is a cluster of 7% of the work which was close to adding to the evidence of positive change. A significant shift from the collection of pilot studies to the full global sample is a marked increase in the conversion of awareness to capability, whilst the increase in the weighting of media literacy work at the access level is to do with the clarity of evidence at that level, rather than a lower ambition for change. This is also related to the non-linear nature of the theory of change. 

Across the 400 interventions mapped, the most common forms of change evidence are forms of qualitative data, including work produced for interventions, participant interviews and focus groups, evaluations of projects, surveys baseline to endpoint distance travelled metrics, evidence-based recommendations for media literacy work in policy and practice, toolkits and resources produced for and during projects and a range of latent potential change indicators, subject to the conversion of intentions into action, with many projects lacking capacity for longitudinal follow up to measure the consequential extension of change. This is a factor in 40% of interventions being mapped to capability, since the evidence of this is often most available within the scope of a project. 

An inherent tension to the model at work here is that there are so many moving parts around media literacy. The Consequences level is dependent on motivation, personal circumstances, political views, lived experience and the influence of family, community and peers. This is why it is so important to understand literacy as dynamic, but it also means that the significant potential for media literacy claimed as consequential is equally dynamic and in play with so many negotiations and many variables, so many ‘known unknowns’. 

As this project was nearly finished, Jen Rowsell published The Comfort of Screens (2025). This is a deep and rich study of the post-digital screen lives of seventeen people living on the same street, in keeping with the author’s ongoing commitment to understanding literacy as it is lived. Rowsell concludes with a call for us to see the wonder in our screen lives and evokes Virginia Woolf in giving prominence to human souls, connections and passions, in, with and sometimes against our screens: 

I do not want to make light of the considerable negative forces at work in screen lives, but I believe in the promise of taking the higher ground and enacting wonder in our interactions with screens. I really do believe in communication’s ability to last and change with the times and needs and I equally believe that postdigitality has great potential for co-creation, co-production, disruption and wonder. (Rowsell, 2025: 175) 

That word ‘potential’ is working hard in this project. A paradox is present on every page. On the one hand, you are encouraged to accept this ‘claim less, change more’ mantra, to see how we have over-claimed in our field, for all good reasons, with solutionist rhetoric and confirmation bias to show the value of our work. You are encouraged to use the theory of change to more precisely design and evaluate your own media literacy work, to provide more evidence of less change.  But at the same time, the findings you are about to read, for the consequences of media literacy, combined with the threshold table at the end of the chapter before, make huge claims. This is, no doubt, a tension in the model. But it is those things that Rowsell observes, her reimagining of ruling passions, that resonates with this  tension, hopefully. 

Presenting a ‘version’ of media literacy through a theory of change which sees the positive consequences of media literacy in and to the communication ecosystem is understood in relation to how it furthers causes of social justice but also unsettles media literacy itself to bring forms of knowledge and media lives from the margins. This means that the 6.5% of interventions confirmed as consequential is ‘skewed’ by the criteria for change set out, being always-already connected to hopes for diversity, social justice, epistemological de-centering, participation and social cohesion. Clearly, if we used a theory of change where the metrics for positive consequences for technical or economic—aspects of media literacy work which here are restricted to the capability level—the distribution of projects would be different and we might claim more impact. This is a very important disclaimer for this entire exercise.  In this way, a key finding from this project has been the validation of this hypothesis, that we over-claim and change less than we want to, but that we can, through this approach, see a clear pathway to this being different and better.  Clearly, the framing is at least partly self-fulfilling, since the map is drawn this way, the cartography is orientated. In theory, we could have the same focus on consequences, but see these as more neutral, or at least with the more far-reaching and challenging desires for epistemic ‘recharting’ of the field. In so doing, we could find more consequential media literacy, and we would need less of the ‘productive humility’ these results call for. 

Recommendations 

From the evidence here of 400 recent media literacy activities from all over the world which a theory of change has identified as making a difference to people’s lives, five key recommendations can now be made for the diverse field of postdigital media literacy and these richer, less binary and more sensitive and nuanced, more precise ways of thinking about people and media and screens and life:

1. Media literacy work should be designed, implemented and evaluated with a clear pathway to positive change for the participants involved and their onward contributions to a healthier communication ecosystem.  We understand this to be an environment which enables practices which nurture equality, diversity, respect, empathy and the redistribution of power in the service of social cohesion and self-efficacy in postdigital media life for the hitherto ‘seldom heard.’  

2. Media literacy work in this time of postdigital complexity should avoid over-claiming by being precise and rigorous about the nature of change it wants to create, and with a focus on viability and evidence at the latent potential to manifest change threshold, to change more or less, with productive humility. 

3. To generate more evidence of manifestly positive change, as opposed to the strong potential for such, we need to apply for funding and support longitudinal interventions and/or use control groups to compare outcomes. 

4. Third-space and co-creation intervention design is clearly the most effective approach to media literacy work for meaningful change. Therefore, the postdigital media literacy field should adopt these design principles as default pedagogic and methodological approaches from this rich evidence of what works. 

5. To achieve the kinds of positive change this exercise found across the consequential work, media literacy interventions and educational encounters should adopt imagined future equity as a first principle for a healthy postdigital communication ecosystem. It is clear from this work that to try to ‘do media literacy’ as a neutral set of skills and competencies or to restrict our work to risk reduction and resilience, in a binary mindset which ignores the iterative media dance we all perform (Rowsell, 2025), without a declaration of intent for media literacy to increase equity, shift epistemic dynamics and further social justice, is counter-productive to our collective cause. 

To take one example, Shin Mizokoshi’s Biotope project is essentially a performance of the dance. The premise of the approach is to mobilise collaboration in communities by engaging with the media biotope at the thresholds between human interaction and engagement with and through media in networks of interconnected elements.

Extensions of McLuhan: Back to The (Healthier) Future

Yuval Noah Harari’s recent “brief history of information networks” is a zeitgeist warning for our AI futures, in keeping with much of the spirit of McLuhan’s ‘big ideas.’ The concern here is with ‘the network,’ which is inorganic, ‘always on,’ fallible and existentially threatening. The truism that more information is inherently good is challenged in the context of network power harnessing information outside of any value system we might desire. The thesis is convincing, at first situating every advance in the distribution of information networks as a catalyst for historical change, of which AI is just the latest case, but then concluding that, whilst we can be productively reminded that information networks have always been used by humans to gain power and do harm, AI poses a more alarming challenge, since:

What little historical perspective we have gained from the recent alarming events in Myanmar, Brazil and elsewhere indicates that in the absence of strong self-correcting mechanisms, AIs are capable of promoting distorted worldviews, enabling egregious abuses of power and instigating terrifying new witch hunts. (2025: 400).   

Isabella Rega sees the developing situation as no less dangerous, but differently so. Rather than this being the next iteration of the ever-expanding ecosystem, Rega sees a kind of network enclosure: 

What if the disruptive revolution of generative AI, what will change our world forever, what is going to turn our societies upside down, is not its incredible transformational potential, but precisely the opposite: the very plausible possibility that GenAI will freeze us, the human race, in an endless present, impeding transformation, disruption, radical (epistemic) turns, and condemning us to live forever in the current paradigm(s), in the current status quo? (Rega. Forthcoming, 2026) 

Harari ends with hope, still. The account concludes by stating that building trust between humans is the urgent project. Rega implies the same, evoking previous ‘paradigm shifts’ which mobilised human rights, redistributions of power and cultural shifts in perception. Harari reminds us of the historical constant of change and the agency we always have to make better choices. Although the majority of his 500 pages are devoted to the history of how we have misused information for self-destruction, each example foregrounds the choices we can make for the better, since “the clearest pattern we observe in the long-term history of humanity isn’t the constancy of conflict but rather the increasing scale of co-operation.” (Harari, 2025: 389)  In warning of the potential for AI to be the final paradigm shift, Rega reminds us of the epistemic power of humans, through the arts, progressive ethics, protest and change. From both, we think back to Mark Cocker—‘together, we are hope’—and back, indirectly to, and against the grain of, McLuhan. 

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes to ‘fly from McLuhan’ (2022: 226), to his literal curb, to re-understand media in resistance to his concern with Western man (Narcissus) and “our” enslavement in the age of electronic media. Chun’s afterword to Sharma and Singh’s feminist re-appraisal (2022) speaks to how the authors in the collection accumulate to both “embrace and open” McLuhan. This is attempted by thinking about how technologies can be designed to come into being different, and better, social worlds; by bearing witness to how “alternative conceptions of movement and media connect to rethinking and re-creating humanness, moving beyond and through questions of repetition to the forces of movement and media.” (Chun, 2022: 230) 

This project was big and complex, but it had a very simple objective – to show how media literacy can make a positive difference to people’s lives and to society, in these challenging times, but also to be clear that media literacy itself is not the solution to our problems. This theory of change for media literacy exists to go beyond solutionism, not only to do media literacy better, but to make a difference with media literacy, to make a difference to lives, in the pursuit of social justice, for the redressing of inequalities, to listen to other voices and act for human rights now and for ecocentric, equitable futures, built fundamentally on human trust. We need, then, to use this theory for change, through dynamic media literacy work, for the different and better social worlds Chun flies from McLuhan to imagine. 

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