ABSTRACT
With the advent of Web 2.0, the media consumer is endowed with the ability to consume, produce and disseminate media messages that often involve multimodal representations, which incorporate text, images and sound. Consequently, in both receptive and expressive modes of communication, multimodal representation demands that media consumers have knowledge and competencies in a wide range of aspects-textual understanding, visual and aural literacy, genre identifi cation, critical analysis, legal know-how, ICT skills, industry insights and more. While multimodal representation in itself poses signifi cant media literacy challenges to the media consumer, this chapter argues that several concomitant trends in the mediascape further compound the severity of these challenges: the growing ease of manipulability of media content, the rise in media genrehybridisation and the increasing proliferation of user-generated media content. The chapter then considers why and how media literacy needs to be reassessed in a mediascape increasingly marked by multimodality. Finally, it concludes by identifying which literacies are most critical in our current mediascape and makes several recommendations for research and policy formulation.
