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distribution of such facilities. Communication rights are blocked by global poverty
and totalitarian regimes, and therefore imply demands for a transnational redistribu-
tion of media resources.
(2) There is also a need for social resources, since communication is a matter of inter-
action that always takes place in specific social and spatial contexts. Not only must
there be access to texts and machines, but also to the social organization of a wide
range of media circuits and genres, engaging all human senses and covering both fact
and fiction, news and entertainment, information and the arts, and offering access to
multifarious spaces for communication, including public libraries widened to
mediatheques. There must be appropriate settings for acquiring media through
purchases, gifts or loans, and for using these media for a wide set of different
purposes. There is thus a continued need for public spheres, linked to public spaces:
physically located sites for face-to-face interaction as well as geographically dispersed
virtual spaces for mediated interaction. Public space has functioned in virtual forms
since the advent of mass media. The interacting citizens who once formed the early
bourgeois public sphere did not just meet in salons and coffee houses, but were also
united as readers of printed books and newspapers. Today, there are very many more
forms of such virtual public space, whether gathered through dissemination of
centrally produced mass media messages, or through more or less horizontal
dialogues via telephones or computer networks. Still, public space continues to be
needed in a material sense as well, in order to enable embodied human beings to
interact fully and with all senses.
(3) Third, each individual needs personal resources to be able to make full use of the
available media texts and machines in the accessible social settings for such media use.
Williams belongs to a persistent tradition, in Britain as well as in Sweden, for which
this is discussed in terms of popular education and literacy. This position has roots in
an Enlightenment project of elevating the masses. From alphabetization and mass
education to public service and media literacy, this project has had tremendous
effects. It has empowered the working classes and other subordinate groups, but it has
also had a problematic paternalistic tendency to evaluate these personal skills
according to a biased normative scale, derived from the standards and norms of bour-
geois high culture. Populist and neo-liberal relativists have on the contrary argued
against all state intervention and tended to collapse civil society and the public sphere
into the market, which they falsely trust to offer a satisfactory supply to every existing
demand. However, it is now possible to reformulate the model of media literacy
without falling back to such an individualist position. Habermas’s ideas of the life-
world processes of social integration seated in civil society imply a more fruitful
perspective. Personal capacities must be related to the specific demands raised by the
communicative situation of each individual, each moment and each place. Media
literacy thus cannot be a straightforward question of trained experts teaching young
people how to listen to music or use the Internet. In many media areas, there is no