ABSTRACT
Media literacy has been defi ned as the ability “to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (Aufderheide, 1993 , p. xx). This defi nition, developed more than two decades ago, still infl uences a now vast fi eld of research, despite the fact that it “lacks specifi city” and “cannot provide much detail to people who want to design educational strategies” (Martens, 2010 , p. 2). Hobbs ( 2011a ) went on to expand this defi nition into the ability to access, analyze, create, refl ect, and act . While researchers focused intensively on access in the early years, especially in the context of the OfCom (Buckingham, 2007 ) and digital inequalities (Paulussen, Courtois, Mechant, & Verdegem, 2010 ), the Social Web set the stage for an immense diff erentiation of the concept into information literacy (Koltay, 2011 ), digital literacy (Hobbs, 2011a ), ICT literacy (Friemel & Signer, 2010 ), new media literacies (Jenkins et al., 2006 ), and, most recently, social media literacy (Livingstone, 2014 ). At the same time, scholarly attention has shifted from the original technological defi nition of media literacy to focus on the communication and creation of messages, and, therefore, participatory skills (e.g., Martens & Hobbs, 2015 ; Mihailidis, 2014 ). Today, scholars stress that both the media’s off erings and social interactions play a crucial role in understanding (digital) media literacy (Livingstone, 2014 ).
