WELCOME TO EXTREME MEDIA STUDIES
WELCOME
Today's media reshape the landscapes of our daily lives right under our feet.
As media artists and teachers, we're convinced that if we can sense and map media patterns
and the forces behind them while they are just now appearing--
we have the chance to shape the extreme media that are shaping us.
Welcome to this collaboration among first responders to extreme media phenomena.
Here, you can acquire and practice one of the most fundamental skills humans need today:
the ability to navigate and shape massive change as it unfolds.
WHAT IT IS
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is a hybrid of museum exhibition, media design and production studio, web-event, aesthetic experience, and experimental laboratory.
You can experience it through scans and flashpoints.
scans investigate diverse extreme media phenomena that are reshaping core human experiences right now. They navigate forces so fluid, so volatile, no one can tell what their impacts will be.
scan #1: NAVIGATING (making your way through a moving landscape)
scan #2: MOBILES (finding voice and being heard).
scan #3: MONITORAL CITIZEN (taking action, finding community, creating meaning).
scan #4: READING BEYOND (making sense of the world in a time of overwhelming complexity and multi-tasking).
scan #5: TRANSMEDIA STORIES (creating new stories and new ways to tell them, sensing and making sense of the world in new ways.
flashpoints extend your imaginations, creativity, and experimental thinking even further--beyond the leading edges of emerging media. They sense and respond to what we don't yet know about emerging media. Flashpoints document the earliest hints of trends, forces, and daily life experiences that might grow into full-blown extreme media phenomena. And they set the stage for learning by making--at the flashpoints.
Flashpoints turn ExtremeMediaStudies.org into a high speed feeler. An antenna in motion.
flashpoint #1: GOING REMOTE
flashpoint #2: WILD IMAGINATION
flashpoint #3: LIMIT CASES
flashpoint #4: HUMAN TRACE
HOW TO USE
Start with SCAN #1: NAVIGATING. It introduces you to the big ideas and processes inside ExtremeMediaStudies.org. "How to use scans" and "How to use flashpoints" give you a complete orientation and overview.
WHAT WE MEAN BY EXTREME MEDIA:
media devices, contents, and uses that plunge us
into deep core qualitative change. They alter
how we relate to others and reshape
our senses of who we are.
You know it's extreme if it:• unleashes deep change in the core meanings and experiences of our daily lives. Extreme media tip deep change on a massive, even global scale.
• changes quickly and deploys quickly, combining and recombining in months not years, and spreading widely in a viral way.
• outstrips what we know. Largely "invisible" to academics, mainstream journalists and corporations, it is extreme if it breaks down what we think we know and even who we think we are. It throws "what's human" into crisis by leading us to ask "is it media or is it a human body?" It throws "what's real" into crisis by leading us to question: "is it an image or is it reality"?.
• deeply reshapes our relationships, disconnections, and/or interactions with others and our selves.
• disrupts the status quo, redistributes authority and responsibility and makes us more autonomous and more connected at the same time.
• generates uncertainty about where it's going and awakens (perhaps more democratic) speculation about alternative futures.
Extreme media make us ask ourselves and each other about what lies ahead:
"Do we want this?"
"What does this new thing make possible?"
"What does it make impossible?"
LIVING WITH EXTREME MEDIA
Meet Deb Patterson and experience how an extreme medium has created fundamental, qualitative change in her life. Deb communicates via the Vanguard. She operates it by using a reflective sticker on her forehead. Jamie Kruse interviewed Deb Patterson, with the assistance of Carol Hollowell. Carol works with Deb as a Community Guide at ACAP (Adaptive Community Approach Program) in Waukesha, WI. Deb was recently named Wisconsin's Self-Advocate of the Year in recognition of her work. She is also an artist (her favorite color is purple), actor, extreme sports enthusiast, and media maker. Her new communication device has made her an extreme media enthusiast as well.
WHO IT'S FOR
We designed ExtremeMediaStudies.org for college students and teachers in communication arts, design, English and new literacies, American Studies, journalism, interdisciplinary studies, anthropology, business, even engineering.
We invite you to "adopt" ExtremeMediaStudies.org as you would a supplementary text and to creatively adapt and integrate its features into you local contexts and practices.
Unlike any textbook or website currently available, ExtremeMediaStudies.org uses digital media to join theoretical and critical exploration with aesthetic experience.
ExtremeMediaStudies.org orchestrates a network of digital tools, media-rich content, and web 2.0-supported collaboration into:
1) multimedia content;
2) projects that connect to life offline;
3) academic areas of study introduced through popular media;
4) user-generated materials that catalyze collaborative thought and design.
The result is a transmedia environment that is truly open-ended even as it builds a strong context filled with foundational knowledge.
Our wager is that ExtremeMediaStudies.org can be at the lead of new ways to fuse education, media, and design-and reach toward what we don't yet know about emerging media.
WHY WE ARE DOING THIS
Two years ago, we (Liz Ellsworth and Kit Laybourne) gave a simple assignment in our team-taught class. It turned us in a whole new direction. We asked students to present short "Media Scans": "Scan today's media devices and environments. Look for phenomena that illustrate or go beyond ideas we've studied. How do your scans make you think about or design media in new ways?" Almost without exception, students took on topics related to but outside the curriculum. Any curriculum. They reached into their day-to-day experiences. They were drawn to media phenomena that changed basic patterns of daily life (the computer game addiction of one student's nephew; DIY designers making real money by customizing avatars for Second Life users). Students looked at these media-induced changes in extreme ways: they exceeded academic disciplines, used marginalized knowledges, and "thought about" unfamiliar media phenomena by making media in response. All of this turned our classroom discussions extreme. Over the course of our marathon six-hour meetings, students used the day's Media Scans to test and question our "official" curriculum. We were in the midst of a "teachable moment." And it was we who were learning new ways to teach with and about media. With web designer Jamie Kruse, we set out to see if we could bottle the magic. Read more about us on the "about site" page.