Pause for Thought: Media Literacy in an Age of Incessant Change

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We live in an age of rapid technological change. The platforms, devices, apps, and other media forms that leave a mark on our everyday lives seem to emerge and then obsolesce with dizzying rapidity. This poses particular problems for those of us who study and teach media today. As hard as we might try to keep pace with such shifts, our theoretical concepts will always seem to 'lag' behind recent developments in media and communications technologies, as well as the everyday practices that arise from such developments. How are we to formulate a comprehensive curriculum of media education, when we cannot accurately foretell what media forms will predominate in two years' time and have no chance of predicting the social and cultural changes that will accompany these media?Such challenges are not confined to media studies education, but are emblematic of much broader social and cultural transformations. Stress and unease over the increasingly hurried tempo of everyday life are longstanding features of modern existence, but they have become especially acute at a time when the accelerated logic of digital, networked media systems works its way into almost every aspect of our experience, and the market-oriented watchwords of efficiency and productivity determine not only our labour, but our social and leisure time. The ever-greater pace of technological development affects all of us, and the consequence of this is that media literacy - and in particular, the question of how we as individuals can navigate the fluctuations of our hyper-mediated world - is not an issue merely confined to the institutional setting of the university, but constitutes a broader public concern. In this context, we believe that rather than being hampered by the fast-paced cycles of contemporary media, media studies can actually help understand and challenge this obsession with contemporaneity.The goal of this project is to create an interdisciplinary network of principally UK-based scholars, writers, artists, media practitioners, and industry professionals who are invested in the future of media literacy and who might both benefit from and contribute to the formulation of modes of analysis, creative practices, and teaching strategies appropriate for our rapidly shifting media landscape. In doing this, we wish to foreground the fact that media studies is implicated across numerous disciplines and applicable to a wide range of industries. Media education does not occur solely within the classroom, but is an everyday feature of life in a world saturated by media technologies. We hope to broaden the scope of what might be considered 'media studies', drawing from a range of viewpoints and approaches both academic and non-academic. We believe that media studies - which is no longer limited to the traditional boundaries of broadcast media, but instead concerns the full gamut of devices, platforms, apps, networks, and infrastructures that surround us today - is able to provide a unique perspective on our technologically-mediated world, grounded in the reflective, critical resources of the humanities. Through two workshops and an academic symposium, our network will discuss, formulate, and publish nascent strategies for negotiating and resisting the pressures, anxieties, and hindrances that are commonly faced in this high-speed society, producing a dialogue that takes seriously the continued importance of critical theory and critical pedagogy in reflecting upon media literacy. We see this network as an opportunity to inspire provocative, creative proposals responding to the continuing importance of media theory, media practice (including, but not limited to, various forms of artistic practice), and media research methods, to raise awareness of the critical tools that media studies, and the humanities more generally, hold for understanding the high-speed society, and to facilitate unexpected encounters between diverse participants.