BOURGEOIS MEDIA LITERACY AS A HISTORICAL CATEGORY

Decisive for this study, the literature review is aimed at describing the competencies of readers in public spaces to transform newspaper contents, with the examples especially from Britain through the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In this framework, the readership concept is a key, briningg together the literature on early era journalism with Jürgen Habermas' conceptualization of public sphere. On the other hand, a latter work of Habermas, Communicative Action Theory, helps to state the historical background of media literacy in the frame of contemporary problems. Thus, the rise of bourgeois media literacy during the enlightenment and the fall of it after industrial capitalism have been explicated on the axis of lifeworld and system duality. The emergence of Occidental modernity as an embodiment of bourgeois worldviews, and its alienation to its Enlightenment ideals as the fragmentation of lifeworld, had been experienced in the same direction. In the context of qualitative methods and descriptive social sciences/hermeneutics, this study purposes a comprehension of a social phenomenon through the historical examples and to examine its conditions of existence in the current era. Evaluation and conclusion based on the literature asserts the potentiality of media literacy to be grounded on a coherent theoratical frame, rather than temporary approaches. Bourgeois media literacy is an expression for self-fulfilling critical literacy competencies born in the public sphere, without any pre-determined education programs. Defining media literacy and any related concepts based on these competencies would be conducive for the development of a theoretical frame and valid educational programs against any challenges of time and place. Beyond their potential of application in education environments, critical media literacy competencies, which individuals would transfer into daily communication practices, have a potential of reconstruction of modernity