The Role of the Audience within Media Governance: The Neglected Dimension of Media Literacy

Conceptualisations of media literacy often include the dimension of the media users’ participation in media regulation or, more general, media governance. In doing so the expectation is stressed, that beyond the ability to participate in media-related communicative practices, literacy would also mean that media users engage in forming the technical, political, and economic conditions for communication processes. However, this aspect seems to be widely neglected when it comes to empirical research on patterns and levels of media literacy. As a consequence, talking about media users as actors of media governance sounds unfamiliar and somehow strange: Media politics and media regulation are rather done for media users and their interests – or sometimes rather against their interests – but almost never by media users. This article proposes a conceptual clarification of the potential roles of the audience and discusses them with regard to concrete instruments that could help to strengthen this aspect of media literacy and thus the role of audiences in media governance.