Analysis
Questions of equality in knowledge, culture and participation though media are not simply to be resolved by addressing the question of access. A sustained and satisfactory engagement with symbolic texts rests on a range of analytic competencies:readers and viewers must be literate in the sense of being competent in and motivated towards relevant cultural traditions and values. While the reader-response theorists identified competencies for the reader of literary works, media scholars identified parallel interpretative skills to decode audiovisual media; it is these skills that media education programs teach to children. Buckingham(1998), building on Bazalgette's(1999) work, outlines a six-fold scheme which teaches students to address questions of media agency, media categories, media technologies, media languages, media audiences, and media representations. If we treat this as an initial specification of the analytic competence for effective use of new media, this could offer a valuable framework for new media literacies. On the other hand, it could be argued that our analytic repertoire- genre, narrative, authorial voice, modality, literary merit- is heavily dependent on its historical origins in print, being therefore only poorly applicable to new media.