The article deals with the problems associated with the understanding of the status of media education among modern cognitive practices. The specificity of its heuristic resources is also considered. The author of the article emphasizes that within the framework of the classical epistemological paradigm, it is impossible to fully intelligible capture or institutionalize the autonomy and necessity of the subject under consideration. This is not so much connected with the fact that media education as a phenomenon is in the stage of self-determination, but primarily with its ontological “fictitiousness” and dispersal over various applied, separate and specialist areas of knowledge. The article suggests that any attempt to establish media education within the traditional horizon of modern European cognition can only lead to profanation and discreditation of both the subject itself and the procedures being performed. Such an approach seems to be heuristically productive, in which there is a correction of the research optics, and media education itself is interpreted only as a precedent and symptom due to radical shifts. They occur in the conceptosphere and relate to such fundamental constants as reality, space, time, anthropological presets, the constitution of the world’s surroundings, etc.