Issue No. 20   2011 — Slow Media

abstracts

By Jennifer Rauch

In recent years, a new subculture has begun to form whose members constrain their use of fast, digital media in favor of slow, analog activities. The emergent concept of “Slow Media” marks a cultural innovation, a new way of thinking about and engaging with communication technologies. Slow Media is both a philosophy (an appreciation of print and analog media that challenges mainstream assumptions about technological progress), and a practice (re-directing media production and consumption toward “slower” mediated or unmediated activities, often by reducing use of digital networks and devices). I create a snapshot here of Slow Media’s origins by looking at its early diffusion through popular and press discourse. My analysis focuses on three periods of development: precursors who envisioned such a cultural movement; the de facto emergence of Slow Media in 2009; and the idea’s diffusion during the first year. I discuss chronological, geographic and institutional patterns that show when and where people began talking about Slow Media, how it entered the public agenda, and which discourses have been influential in its wider dissemination. By constructing this preliminary history, I aim to help scholars interested in Slow Media, or other aspects of the media-avoidance and –resistance subcultures, to locate avenues for future research.

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By Tero Karppi

In 2009 leaving Facebook became a trend. Two separate art projects Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine presented digital suicide as a method to disconnect oneself from the social networking service.  In this article, I approach the problem of leaving Facebook. A critical analysis of leaving Facebook and using digital suicide sites illustrates how life becomes tangled and controlled in the ubiquitous webs of network culture, and moreover how biopolitical models of capitalism are embedded in the structures and practices of exploiting the users of social networks. Theoretically this article is inspired by critical studies of digital culture.

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By Daniel Ashton and James Newman

From the PDP-1 in the 1960s to the seventh generation consoles of the last few years, digital gaming is marked by continual development. The notion of the perpetual upgrade economy will be introduced as one of the key modes through which digital gaming is organised and promoted to consumers. The concepts of perpetual innovation (see Kline, Dyer-Witheford, de Peuter; 2003) and upgrade culture (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006) point to the emphasis on the continual alteration and upgrading of products, the generation of new commodities with ever-shortening life spans, and the design drive to permanently explore new capacities of each new generation of technologies.

In contrast, the overwhelmingly dominant industry focus on new releases and player practices of discarding digital games technologies in favour of successors, have been reconsidered in terms of recovery and subcultural memories (Ashton, 2008) and archives and preservation, supersession and obsolescence (Newman, 2009). In this paper, practices of walkthrough archiving are explored to consider how the industry logic of progression, speed and updgrade are disrupted and diverged from. Walkthroughs provide both a document of the game as designed and a record of investigations into the vagaries and imperfections of its implementation. This paper will consider three elements of walkthrough practices in terms slow media.

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By Jörgen Skågeby

This paper examines speed in relation to music media. It compares values and common practices surrounding two specific cultural artifacts/media: the cassette tape and the digital playlist. The aim is to explore if and how our understanding of a now marginalized medium and its surrounding practices can co-inform our understanding of digital media objects (and their surrounding practices). Comparisons are made in relation to a theoretical framework of values; appropriated from gift-giving research, where values are grouped into use values, exchange values and social bonding values. The current focus on technical development and use values is tightly connected to increasing speed. It is thus hypothesized that a remediation of social bonding values is specifically important in helping users slow down both the creation and consumption of meaningful experiences in the hyper-abundant cultural media object range of today.

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By Kit MacFarlane

In the popular presentation of calls to “unplug,” whether in the classroom or simply day-to-day life, young people may find their images summoned as an indicator of a changing nature of literacy, communication and understanding of the world around us. However, calls to re-introduce the young to “slow” spaces may leave the real challenges to cultural literacy unharmed, or even re-enforced. This paper will briefly examine two images of the young summoned in the counter-intuitively “fast” discussion of the “slow” unplugging movement and tie these to the recurring historical narrative of a more authentic “slow” space freed from human activity though various cultural analyses by Slavoj Žižek. This will suggest that “slow” spaces may emerge as Carnivalesque eruptions rather than true spaces of cultural change. Engagement with cultural literacy will then be examined in relation to the Affective Domain of learning that  produces the normalisation of values and world-views rather than mere replication of tasks, to suggest that, while institutions’ images may benefit from the presence of “slow spaces,” educators may find their actual engagement with slow learning and the Affective Domain to be an unsupported and unintegrated secondary addition to the primary “real-world” services expected by the institution and students.