With the advent of digitization, our social lives have become increasingly mediated: as well as being central to politics, culture and the economy, digital media are now embedded in our everyday social and intimate relationships. This poses some fundamental challenges for educators. In this talk, I will suggest that we need to move beyond an instrumental view of media and technology, and the superficial ideas of digital skills to which this gives rise. I will propose that we should take a broader, more critical approach to the rise of ‘digital capitalism’, and to the ubiquity of digital media in daily life. I will seek to differentiate between critical media literacy education and more limited ideas about internet safety and information literacy, as well as the emphasis on self-regulation that has become apparent in communications policy.