Media Education as a Resource for Sustainable Development

The article examines complex relationships between culture and development in the context of rapid expansion of the audiovisual communication technologies: film, television and the World Wide Web. The focus of the analysis are media and media education in state cultural policy in contemporary Russia. During the early stages when the term media education was still rare this domain was mostly called film education leaving even television out of the scope. The goal was to adapt the understanding of New Media to the classical mould - film as an art form and TV as a mass media. Only at the brink of the Millennium came the understanding that it is impossible to consider the future problems of social and cultural development without media education as a key component of modernization. We are trying to prove that only education in the rapidly growing field of New Media is able to solve the contradictions between culture and development: while young people learn to analyze and critically assimilate the flows of information, older generations learn how to master new communication technologies, how to navigate the internet and use smartphones and other gadgets. As a result, the generation gap becomes manageable, making sustainable development possible.