::fibreculture:: CFP: Transformations Journal: Slow Media

[Grayson Cooke]

Hi folks,

please see below, a CFP for an issue of the Transformations Journal on 
"Slow Media." Feel free to circulate this elsewhere if you have 
colleagues or students who might be interested.

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*Transformations Journal Call for Papers: “Slow Media”*

Given the contemporary fascination with and, indeed, addiction to 
real-time media dispatch and commentary, what would it mean to speak of 
“slow media”? 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 don’t 
have time to slow down.

“Slow media” 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 
“event” and its reportage. In such a scenario, “slow media” appears 
either heretical or retrogressive, a wanton disregarding of the patent 
necessity of instant information dissemination and rampant friending, or 
just another Luddite reaction-formation. Indeed, “slow media” as a term 
has already been spun-off from the “slow” 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 “slow media” as a term may appear primarily to describe a mode 
of resistance, it also 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 “time barrier”? 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

- social media suicide: suicidemachine.org and seppukoo

- the “slow” movement and resistance

- histories of speed in the media

- tweet-streams and data-feeds

- bandwidth, access and connectivity

Abstracts (500 words): due 1^st 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.


*****

-- 
Dr Grayson Cooke
Course Coordinator BMedia
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Southern Cross University
Military Road
East Lismore NSW 2480
Ph: +61 2 6620 3839
E: grayson.cooke at scu.edu.au