Redefining Visual Literacy in the Post-Digital Era

This study examines the limitations of conventional concepts of visual literacy in light of the technological and structural transformations of visual culture in the post-digital era and proposes an alternative conceptual framework. While traditional approaches to visual literacy have emphasized the interpretation of images as symbolic texts, post-digital environments shaped by generative artificial intelligence and platform-based algorithms increasingly organize image production and visibility through technological systems rather than human intention. Such conditions call into question interpretation-centered approaches to visual experience. Drawing on a critical review of visual literacy discourse and recent scholarship in visual culture and art education, this study reconceptualizes visual literacy as an analytical capacity to examine the structural conditions of visual experience, to critically engage with algorithmically constructed visibility, and to analyze the technological conditions mediating image formation. This reconceptualization provides a theoretical basis for rethinking visual literacy within art education in the post-digital era.