The Power of 8: Towards a New Media Literacy
"Media literacy in the age of YouTube, Twitter and Google? Some argue that online youth cultures now understand more about this than traditional academics and media professionals. So what do this new generation need from the BBC and what can it learn from them?
So - when we talk about 'media literacy', we are faced with two key questions: Just which media are involved? And precisely who do we expect to be literate? This essay explores the need for an entirely fresh look at media literacy as we approach the end of the first decade of what is already a remarkable new millennium.
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Secondly the education system that seeks reluctantly to embrace media literacy - from school to university - has been built around systemic convenience. So much of what passes as acceptable practice exists only for the convenience of the system, and certainly not for the learners. We have a curriculum wrapped around the factory learning concept of 'met before': as students turn over their test papers, their teachers outside the exam room fret, worrying whether everything on the paper has been properly introduced and covered previously. The students turn their papers over nervously hoping for 'no surprises'.
But current youth is not to be found in areas populated by previous generations. The chattering classes are largely not to be found in online forums devoted to machinima or fan fiction. Youth user-generated media leaps virally and unheeded from phone to phone and achieves status via word of mouth in social networks. Youth culture has been led to new and often unseen places. The question is how should media literacy, as a broad concept, respond to that?"
(Professor Stephen Heppell, p.6)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
GUPEA: Fashion-able. Hacktivism and engaged fashion design
"This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able. As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through 'open source' fashion 'cookbooks'. By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative 'hacking' at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on."
Available as PDF
CONTRIBUTOR
David RogersonSHARE
Ficly: a better, shorter story
"Ficly is about creativity. ... everyone can carve out fifteen minutes to either continue a story someone else has started, or start something of their own - something simple - two, maybe three paragraphs of a character, a plot or even just a place.
That's the premise. We impose a limit of 1,024 characters because we think constraints are good. They make you choose your words more carefully."
(Jason Garber, Kevin Lawver)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
