Media literacy and information literacy: Subset, overlapping, or parallel relationship?

In the knowledge society there is a call for cultivating “Media and Information Literacy” (MIL). This requires the cooperation of the fields of media literacy and information literacy. However, the uncertainty about the territory boundary of these two fields hinders a smooth merger. This paper aims at exploring the relationship between these two fields. It empirically maps out their territories and discusses their similarities and differences. Findings show that the two fields have different authors, university affiliations and journals, and also differ in terms of scope, analytical approach and social concern. Media literacy is not a subset of information literacy as some scholars suggested. They share the same goal and their publications overlap in terms of subject areas, countries of origin and title words. The two fields have common ground in cooperating and contributing to the promotion of new literacy in the knowledge society.