ABSTRACT
Perhaps denizens of an age of interactive technologies will look back at the passive couch potatoes of the era in which television was the dominant form of entertainment in wonder. Perhaps our time will be looked at as an especially retrograde period when individuals had not yet adjusted to new technologies, when they were overwhelmed by new media, and not yet well enough educated to govern themselves and control the technologies and media. Critical media literacy also sees media as a form of power and looks at political economy and ownership of media, its political effects, and how certain texts of media promote interests of oppression and domination, while others promote liberation, freedom, democracy, and positive values. The proliferation of media culture and technologies focuses attention on the importance of media politics and the need for public intervention in debates over future of media culture and communications in the information and social media highways and entertainment byways of the future.
