[csaa-forum] Transformations Journal Call for Papers: ³Slow Media²

[Warwick Mules]

Transformations Journal Call for Papers: ³Slow Media²
 
 
Given the contemporary fascination with and, indeed, addiction to real-time
media dispatch and commentary, what would it mean to speak of ³slow media²?
Dare we even think such a thing when everything around us screams of
increased speed, increased bandwidth, and increased convergence? We are
24-7, we are always-on, we are connected; we are locatable, we are X/Y
coordinated, we are plotted; we are status updated, we are tweet-fed, we are
real-time media junkies and we don¹t have time to slow down.
 
³Slow media² is surely inimical to the age of social media and 24-hour news
channels, where we live immersed in a mediascape dedicated to reducing to
nothing the temporal division between the occurrence of an ³event² and its
reportage. In such a scenario, ³slow media² appears either heretical or
retrogressive, a wanton disregarding of the patent necessity of instant
information dissemination, or just another Luddite reaction-formation.
Indeed, ³slow media² as a term has already been spun-off from the ³slow²
movement more generally, and is used to describe the reduced media diet of
people turning off the email, closing the facebook, and going outside for a
sniff of the flowers.
 
But while ³slow media² as a term may appear primarily to describe a mode of
resistance, it allows us to think about the speed of the media as such. Have
our popular media always been increasing in speed? What is the end point of
all of this, the apotheosis of real-time: are we, as Bernard Stiegler
suggests, approaching the ³time barrier²? And, what happens when we break
it?
 
For this issue of Transformations, we invite papers that meditate on the
speeds and slownesses of the contemporary moment. Papers could address, but
would need not be limited to, any of the following themes:
 
-       real-time and the news media

-       social media and the status update

-       new media explorations of speed and slowness

-       artistic responses to speed and time

-       the ³slow² movement and resistance

-       histories of speed in the media

-       tweet-streams and data-feeds

-       bandwidth, access and connectivity

 
 
Abstracts (500 words): due 1st July 2010, with a view to submit articles by
1st October.
 
Abstracts should be sent to Grayson Cooke at grayson.cooke at scu.edu.au
<mailto:grayson.cooke at scu.edu.au> .
 
View Transformations online: http://www.transformationsjournal.org
<http://www.transformationsjournal.org> . 

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