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The Post Industrial Media Project is a collaborative teaching and learning research project undertaken by Adrian Miles, Allan Thomas, David Carlin, Glen Donnar, Paul Ritchard, Rachel Wilson and Seth Keen of the RMIT Media program.
Contents |
A post industrial afternoon tea with Stuart Moulthrop (Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
When: Monday October 17, 1.30 pm to somewhere around 4pm.
Venue: TBC
What: A series of responses, riffs, ideas, appropriations and critiques around the concept of post industrial media (more or less using the outline below as a beginning proposition).
How: A group of roundtable invitees will present 5 minute responses in relation to the concept of post industrial media. This will be followed by a moderated open discussion, debate, and conversation amongst audience and the roundtable members. All will be recorded for reuse in an academic publication.
Contemporary professional media is experiencing paradigmatic change that will redefine what we understand 'the media' to be. This change affects the production, distribution, broadcasting, consumption, use and even the things that constitute 'media'. Media industries are caught between historical practices that once seemed relevant and an emerging ecology that is redefining the meaning of centre and periphery and has redefined what we mean by a media network. A corollary of this change is the imperative to reconsider what media education is.
What is taught, how, and what sorts of artefacts and practices might now be the object of media studies as a discipline? The Media program, a three year undergraduate degree at RMIT University, has appropriated the phrase 'post-industrial media' as a probe to investigate, contextualise, critique and problematise the intersections and tensions between what are now 'heritage' media institutions versus scholarly activity, emerging forms, and vernacular, everyday media practices.
In 1976 Daniel Bell wrote:
Dated and sexist language notwithstanding, the general observations made by Bell provide a productive heuristic to conceptualise and frame what the concept, practice, and theory of post industrial media might be. Existing commercial media, aka 'big' media, are clearly concerned with knowledge work and intellectual property and so appear as post industrial in Bell's model. However, with the rise of the Internet such media institutions can now be seen as being within an industrial paradigm which is more concerned with the production of goods (conceived of as programming and audience aggregation) which are bought and sold than being an industry that has "a base in theoretical knowledge" (Bell, 47). Media companies, are, at the end of the day, in the business of producing discrete artefacts for media channels and systems that, in turn, create audiences for sale. As Bell notes, such industrial models require major capital investment and machine technologies.
However, with the near zero cost of making and distributing media via digitisation and the internet, the industrial 'rationale' that informed, defined, and legitimated media is now dissolving. In addition, value is increasingly shifting from the 'product' or media institution and situated within practice, community, consumption, and service. Here (and now) media making, distribution, and use is about relations between people, technologies, protocols and things, rather than audiences and programming. Today’s emerging media giants reflect this, to the extent where they can be conceived of as simply sites that enable practice to occur (YouTube, Flickr, blogging more broadly). In this scenario content may be secondary to experience and the social.
This shift, from the capital intensive, one way broadcast model of industrial media to what remains, at best, a series of emergent institutions, practices, and forms, is to be investigated through the heuristic of the 'post-industrial'. The aim is less about evaluating the relevance or applicability of Bell's argument than its use as a schema from which to begin, build, and critique a praxis of post industrial media. Our aim is to use this to provide a theoretically engaged language to reconceptualise our approach to media studies, media studies education, our relation to ‘industry’ and to the production of scholarly knowledge in these contexts.
Bell, D. (1976). "Welcome to the Post-Industrial Society." Physics Today, (February), 46–49.
Bell, Daniel. "Welcome to the Post-Industrial Society". Physics Today. February, 1976. pp. 46-9.