This Project is based on Powell's The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers (Practical Action: 1995) (see "Navigating EMS" 's Experience Capsule).
Keep a journal for a day.
Observe and document how you and others around you act as media fitters according to Edgerton's and Powell's uses of that term.
Pick one instance of your or someone else's act of media fitting.
Do any of the following adequately explain the instance of media fitting that you observed?
Adjust, Adapt, Domesticate, Alter
If not, think experimentally! Name the fitting that you experienced.
The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent nonprofit research group that works with organizations to help them make more informed decisions about the future that lead to action.
They call one of their projects the Ten-Year Forecast Program. It studies change in the global environment. Its focus is to anticipate: "discontinuities and emerging dilemmas--discontinuities because they challenge business as usual and dilemmas because they demand new ways of thinking about complex problems. Together, discontinuities and dilemmas provide a vista of new practices and points of view that will shape tomorrow's organizations and today's choices."
Based on their research, they create maps of the coming decade. The Map's job is to "outline paths that connect seemingly unconnected trends [in business, society and the human psyche] to provide logical and coherent views about how the decade could unfold."
The institute's map for this decade focuses on key areas of innovation. All of them refer to media in some way.
View the Ten-Year Forecast Perspectives from the Institute for the Future
Locate your own personal experiences of media trends on the map.
Write a short (500 word) essay that identifies a forecasted extreme media phenomenon that has actually occurred. How does it qualify as an extreme media phenomenon according to our definition?
How does YOUR actual experience of this phenomenon either confirm, disprove, or complicate the Institute's forecast?
In November, 2006, MIT held a conference called "Futures of Entertainment."
Here is how they describe the conference:
"As advertisers look for new ways to engage audiences, content creators search for new audiences, and audiences quest for new ways to connect with culture, the nature of what counts as 'entertainment' is rapidly changing. We are seeing the blurring of aesthetic and technological distinctions between media platforms, of 'advertising' and 'content' and of 'creator' and 'consumer'. Futures of Entertainment brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture. The conference will consider developments such as user-generated content, transmedia storytelling, the rise of mobile media and the emergence of social networking."
Watch at least three of the archived presentations from the futures of entertainment video conference.
Futures of Entertainment Conference
Identify a page in Jenkins' Convergence Culture or his online blog that you think helps us to understand and make something of an extreme media phenomenon discussed in a panel that was interesting to you.
Join the panel: Create a three minute podcast that adds your voice to the panel.
In the podcast, tell why you think the media being discussed qualify as extreme media according to our definition. Also, tell how the page you chose from Jenkins can add something significant to the panel that wasn't considered.
In a resent presentation for a TED conference, Alex Steffen, founder of www.worldchanging.com spoke of how media could answer "some of our planet's greatest challenges."
Steffen listed design innovations and new ideas that his organization was searching for. These included:
ways to make cities denser and more liveable
transit systems that work
green architecture that is off the grid
smart places that know where things are, making it easier to share, because sharing uses less
ways to use less stuff by monitoring the amount we're actually using
bio morphic design
bio mimic-ery design
neo-biological design
leap-frogging technologies
new systems for collaboration
local/cultural adaptations of technologies
serious play: media games that teach processes that can be used to solve world problems
Watch Steffen's presentation at TED (below).
Be an extreme media fitter: Using one of the "world changing" approaches to design that Steffen discussed in his presentation, invent a new use of a media device/content/environment--one never intended by the user's manual.
Create a powerpoint presentation for your invention.
At some point in your presentation, discuss in detail: How might your invented use affect the future of this device/content/environment, and the people who use it?
Rhizome.org supports media desigers and artists who work "at the furthest reaches of technological experimentation as well as those responding to the broader aesthetic and political implications of new tools ane media." They commission artists to creatively map, navigate, and forecast emerging media phenomena.
"In 2009, Rhizome will award seven commissions with fees ranging from $3000-$5000.
This year, Rhizome has expanded our scope, formerly focused strictly on Internet-based art to encompass the broad range of practices that fall under new media art.
This includes projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies to works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. With this expanded format, commissioned works can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices.
This year, all applicants will be reviewed by a selected jury and several awards will be granted through Rhizome's membership in an open, community vote.
Proposal submission takes place online. The deadline is midnight on Monday, March 31, 2008."
Learn more and download the 2008 call for proposals: Rhizome Commissions