ABSTRACT
By relating the five paradoxes carved out in the previous chapters to each other, Chapter Seven opens out into a brief exploration of society’s crisis of information through the prism of media and information literacy understood as a contested area. Responsibility, normativity, temporality, trust, and neutrality are presented as folded into the platformised, algorithmic information infrastructure and its specific affordances for information control and information access. Against this backdrop, the authors reflect on how expressions of media and information literacies, as critical engagements with information, can include awareness of their own contradictions and normative assumptions and still be possible and productive. Critical engagements with information, they argue, need to be affirmative of the ways in which performativity and anticipatory action work together in diverse material-discursive assemblages that are ultimately political. Facing up to this opens up opportunities for action within the platformised information infrastructure, as well as opportunities for bringing about transformation.
