January 18, 2007
New Media Literacies
Training Kids With Skills For Participatory Culture
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION :: Ancestor: Oral Culture :: Residual: Print Culture :: Dominant: Mass Media :: Emergent: Participatory Culture
The above refer to media systems. Media systems consists of communications technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols which grow up around them. In each case, the emergence of a new media system does not simply displace what came before. Instead, the new media system becomes an additional layer in an ever more stratified media ecology.
Missing here is the concept of visual culture -- which can trace its history as far back as oral culture but has historically existed in the orbit of the other media systems. So, cave paintings are believed to have existed in relation to oral culture; stained glass windows and tapestries bridged between oral and print culture; comics exist inside print culture but emerge alongside other mass media, etc.
THE CURRENT MEDIA LANDSCAPE
Innovative -- a period of prolonged and profound technological change; new media are created, dispersed, adopted, adapted, and absorbed at dramatic rates.
Transformative -- a phase of social and aesthetic experimentations as the society absorbs and often anticipates new media technologies.
Convergent -- communication gets organized across multiple channels on both the corporate and grassroots level.
Multimodal -- the same story may be encountered in multiple representations.
Global -- media enables interactions between people around the world which has both positive and negative impacts on local cultures.
Networked -- Media technologies are interconnected so that messages flow easily from one place to another.
Mobile -- people can carry their communications technologies around with them
Appropriative -- new technologies make it easy for people to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.
Participatory -- A blurring of the lines between consumer and producer, a growing emphasis on social affiliations and active engagement around media content.
Collaborative -- the emergence of new structures of knowledge and creativity which depend on shared problem-solving and deliberation.
Diverse -- the walls between cultural communities break down as media flows across various sites of production and consumption within the context of a multicultural society.
Domesticated -- Media technologies are fully integrated into our everyday social interactions.
Generational -- Sharp differences between generations in terms of access to knowledge, cultural tastes and interests, and forms of participation and learning.
Unequal -- Access to technologies, skills, and opportunities for participation are unevenly distributed across the population. More >> [via empyre's current discussion what needs to be done (Skills For Participatory Culture)]
Posted by jo at January 18, 2007 03:54 PM
