Revisiting Richard Hoggart’s classic work The Uses of Literacy (1957), this book applies Hoggart’s framework to media literacy today, examining media literacy’s various uses, the tensions between them and what this means for people, communities and the contemporary configurations of social class.

In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about how his working class community, in the North of England, were at once using the new ‘mass literacy’ for self-improvement, education, social mobility and civic engagement and, at the same time, the powerful...