government to individual governance(Foucault, 199 l), Perhaps even these economic goals will be undermined by the reproduction of the divisive standards and values of the established cultural elite? of research task developed in this paper, namely to cx e our understanding of acc analysis, critical evaluation and content creation from familiar to new media, interestingly it is the latter two which have proved more contentious, yet these are the most crucial to the democratic agenda. only if these are firmly foregrounded a definition of media literacy will people be positioned not merely as selective, receptive and accepting but also as participating, critical; in short, not merely as consumers but a as citizens, Conclusion is paper has argued that literacy concerns the historically and culturally conditioned relationship among three processes, no one of which is sufficient alone: the symbolic and material representation of knowledge, culture and values; (i) the diffusion of interpretative skills and abilities across a(stratified) population; and(iii the institutional, especially, the state management of the power that aceess to and skilled use of knowledge brings to those who are"literate'. As we extend conceptions ofliteracy to embrace new media, the first process-that of representation-is barely addressed in the research literature: until we have a robust account of the media in which people might be judged literate, we can say little about the nature or uses of their literacy. The second process that of skilled interpretation-has much to learn from the well-established traditions of readership and audience reception in two respects. First, media literacy has developed a sophisticated account of the individual skills involved in decoding media texts, although these have yet to be applied to the new media. Second, audience research has developed an interactive view of the relationship between reader and text which, in the context o ICTs, must also encompass questions of technology, Literacy, by extension, cannot be conceived solely as a feature o the user but must also be seen as medium-dependent, a co- production of the interactive engagement between technology and user. Further, this paper argued that, to claim that literacy is changing with the widespread introduction ofICT research establish that the literacy associated with the new media, especially the internet, differs significantly from that of print and audiovisual media. The third process-that of the institutional uses of literacy-invites a more critical take on literacy, particularly insofar as academic research is used to inform policy.