Critical Evaluation of Thinking and Media Literacy Textbook: Deconstructing the Contradictory Meaning of Audience

Media literacy is an educational construction that is constituted through media education process. Audience is one of the bases and constituting elements of this construction which has a double meaning in media education: First, the audience is one of the main debates in media education and second, the learner as an audience in media education is placed in the position that constitutes the media literacy construction. In other words, the teacher and the educational system with the task of educating the learners want to specify some debates on the concept of the audience during the course of teaching the textbook and at the same time, transmit those teachings to the learner that is an audience of media who has a live experience in an increasingly mediated culture. The education is faced with a complex challenge by this fact; on the one hand, media literacy presupposes the active audience to understand its subject; on the other hand, the textbook presupposes the audience as a passive one who is going to gain the necessary subjectivity through the education process. By the perspective of deconstruction, this contradiction is not within the writing of the textbook, nor is outside the text. Therefore the object of analysis in this paper is the very text of the book. The main paper’s question is questioning the meaning and contradictory site of the audience in the textbook. The aim of the paper is highlighting the perceived contradiction by applying Jacques Derrida’s strategy of deconstruction.