Almost everyone agrees that the ability to read and write should be a fundamental human right, extended to everyone. We understand that a person who cannot read is in thrall to (受…控 制， 影响) those who can. You cannot enter the developed world as a full human subject unless you can break and the code of the word. Today, literacy doesn’t stop with words and numbers. To enter social and political debates as a full participant, one must also break the thrall of the magic box and its secrets. If we fail to adopt media literacy—a basic knowledge of how and why media images are chosen—as an essential goal of public cultural policy, we doom ourselves to be forever in the grip of the powerful interests who own and control the mass media. The global proliferation (激增) of electronic mass media has excited deep feeling and passionate debate. Most alarming to observers around the world has been the passivity the mass media seem to breed in most people; it displaces and undermines social life, community activities, and other creative pursuits. As a society, we need to foster a more dynamic relationship between the citizenry and the media; one that does not stop when the program ends and the TV is turned off.
Achieving this will require starting from square one. People without some special interest in the field find it hard to grapple with (理解) the idea that media is a public and political issue. This is not surprising, since one of the things our mass media do best is pound home the inevitability of the way that they are currently organized, ideally suited to their role as the pep squad for our consumer society. Their self-ratifying quality makes it hard even to imagine that the media can be changed in any way.
The massive complex of business interests that make up the mainstream media have been allowed to develop pretty much as they wish, in the pursuit of commercial success. Meanwhile, the essential public issue—the media role as our primary public forum, its tendency to erode democratic life—has been pushed further and further into the background.
It is necessary that we think about and promote a public policy that looks at what role media should play in our society and how people can participate in shaping television and other mass media that affect all of our lives. Such a public policy could counter the imbalances that result from the domination of a country’s cultural industries by commercial interests.
The word "square" in sentence 1, Para.2 means ______.