Media literacy, digital competence and emotional intelligence are all valuable skills. They help people understand information, navigate technology, communicate more effectively and respond to difficult situations.
But individual skills have limits.
A citizen can learn to verify a political claim without having any control over the recommendation system deciding which claims reach millions of people. An employee can become highly competent with digital tools while having almost no visibility into the systems, data and supplier dependencies behind them. A child can learn to regulate anger without being able to change the behaviour that keeps making them angry.
This is the question at the centre of REDefine’s latest weekly recap: when does teaching a skill expand someone’s agency, and when does it quietly transfer responsibility to the person with the least power to change the problem?
Why media literacy now requires an understanding of power
Traditional media literacy teaches us to examine sources, compare information, identify manipulation and look for supporting evidence. Those remain essential habits.
However, today’s information environment adds another layer.
Content can influence people without being false. A real video can be selectively amplified. An accurate statistic can be separated from the context needed to interpret it. Recommendation systems determine which stories repeatedly appear in front of us, while others remain almost invisible.
This means media literacy increasingly requires more than asking, “Is this information true?”
We also need to ask why we are seeing it, who benefits from its circulation, what the platform is rewarding and who has the power to shape those conditions.
Individual critical thinking matters, but information integrity cannot become solely the responsibility of individual citizens.
What is system literacy?
Digital literacy usually describes our ability to use technology effectively. System literacy goes one step further.
It means understanding enough about a digital system to ask meaningful questions about how it works, what it depends on and who controls important decisions within it.
A digitally competent person may know exactly how to use an online platform while still being unable to answer questions such as:
Where is the authoritative data stored? Who owns it? How is an automated score produced? Can an AI-generated output be traced back to evidence? What happens if a supplier changes its service or disappears? Who can challenge or override a digital decision?
People do not need to become software engineers to ask these questions. But as digital systems increasingly determine access to work, education, finance and public services, understanding only the interface is becoming insufficient.
Emotional intelligence should expand agency, not just improve behaviour
The same question appears in a very different setting: emotional education.
Teaching children to recognise feelings, regulate strong emotions, manage conflict and communicate needs can be enormously valuable. But emotional intelligence becomes distorted when it is used primarily to make children easier to manage.
Imagine a child who becomes upset because another pupil repeatedly laughs when she makes a mistake. Helping her calm down may be useful. Breathing, taking some space or finding an adult can all help her regain control.
But somebody still needs to address the behaviour that is causing the problem.
Emotional regulation should give children more possible responses. It should not teach them that every difficult environment is theirs to tolerate more successfully.
So where should responsibility sit?
The answer is not to choose between individual skills and structural change.
We need both.
Citizens benefit from stronger media literacy, while platforms and institutions still carry responsibilities for the information environments they create. Workers need digital skills, while organisations need better governance of the technology on which they depend. Children benefit from emotional intelligence, while adults remain responsible for creating safer and more respectful environments.
The more useful question is whether responsibility is being distributed according to power.
If an individual can change their response but cannot change the conditions producing the problem, teaching them another skill cannot be the entire solution.
That is the argument behind this week’s REDefine recap, The Wrong Person Keeps Getting Homework.
In the full newsletter, we connect our recent work on media literacy, system literacy and emotional intelligence, and we introduce two new 🌟 Writer Spotlights featuring Tim Dasey and Kriti Agarwal / Code Like A Girl.
We also look ahead to two very different questions: what is really hidden behind the price of a €5 online purchase entering Europe, and how fear, anger, hope and other emotions shape political judgement.
Continue reading on REDefine // Civic Intelligence
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