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

我们生活在一个技术快速变革的时代。在我们日常生活中留下印记的平台、设备、应用程序和其他媒体形式似乎以令人眼花缭乱的速度出现，然后过时。这给我们这些今天学习和教授媒体的人带来了特别的问题。尽管我们努力跟上这种转变的步伐，但我们的理论概念似乎总是“落后”于媒体和通信技术的最新发展，以及由此产生的日常实践。如果我们不能准确地预测两年后哪些媒体形式将占主导地位，也没有机会预测伴随这些媒体而来的社会和文化变化，我们如何制定一个全面的媒体教育课程？这些挑战不仅限于媒体研究教育，而是更广泛的社会和文化变革的象征。日常生活克里思越来越快所带来的压力和不安是现代生活的长期特征，但在数字化、网络化媒体系统的加速逻辑几乎渗透到我们生活的各个方面，以及效率和生产力的市场化口号不仅决定了我们的劳动，也决定了我们的社交和休闲时间的时候，这种压力和不安变得尤为严重。技术发展的步伐越来越快，影响着我们所有人，其结果是，媒介素养--特别是我们作为个体如何驾驭超媒介世界的波动的问题--不仅仅是一个局限于大学机构环境的问题，而是一个更广泛的公众问题。在这种背景下，我们相信，而不是被当代媒体的快节奏周期所阻碍，媒体研究实际上可以帮助理解和挑战这种对当代性的痴迷。这个项目的目标是建立一个跨学科的网络，主要是英国的学者，作家，艺术家，媒体从业者，以及投资于媒体素养未来的行业专业人士，他们可能会受益于分析模式的制定，创造性实践，以及适合我们快速变化的媒体环境的教学策略。在这样做的时候，我们希望突出一个事实，即媒体研究涉及众多学科，适用于广泛的行业。媒体教育不仅仅发生在课堂上，而是在一个媒体技术饱和的世界中的日常生活。我们希望扩大什么可能被认为是“媒体研究”的范围，从学术和非学术的一系列观点和方法中汲取。我们相信，媒体研究-这是不再局限于传统的广播媒体的边界，而是关注设备，平台，应用程序，网络和基础设施的全方位今天围绕我们-是能够提供一个独特的视角对我们的技术介导的世界，接地在反思，人文的关键资源。通过两个研讨会和一个学术研讨会，我们的网络将讨论，制定和发布谈判和抵制压力，焦虑和障碍，是在这个高速社会中普遍面临的新生战略，产生认真对待批判理论和批判教育学在反思媒体素养的持续重要性的对话。我们认为这个网络是一个机会，激发挑衅性的，创造性的建议，回应媒体理论，媒体实践的持续重要性，（包括但不限于各种形式的艺术实践）和媒体研究方法，以提高人们对媒体研究和更广泛的人文学科的关键工具的认识，以了解高速社会，并促进不同参与者之间的意外相遇。

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.