Post-industrial Media
This course within the Masters program focuses on the concept of post-industrial media by focusing on mobile videography as a networked media practice.
What is post-industrial media?
The concept of post-industrial is taken from Daniel Bell. Wikipedia provides a summary that is informed from the reading ‘Welcome to Post-Industrial Society’.
He argued that post-industrialism would be information-led and service-oriented. Bell also argued that the post-industrial society would replace the industrial society as the dominant system. There are three components to a post-industrial society, according to Bell:
a shift from manufacturing to services the centrality of the new science-based industries the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification. Bell also conceptually differentiates between three aspects of the post-industrial society: data, or information describing the empirical world, information, or the organization of that data into meaningful systems and patterns such as statistical analysis, and knowledge, which Bell conceptualizes as the use of information to make judgments
The new media theorist and practitioner Adrian Miles uses this post-industrial concept to draw attention to changes that have occurred in media practice, in regards to a shift from a industrial model to a post-industrial model. From the reading ‘PIMP 01: Post-industrial Media: Education’ an edited collection of speculative writing on the concept of post-industrial media education. This quote by Miles the editor is taken from the ‘the proposition’ opening statement:
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.
Course Design – Part A
Converting this concept of media practice into a course within this program involves extending the skills you have covered in your previous networked media course. Another requirement is providing support to the non-fiction project course, which works on cross-media articulation and dissemination.
Networked Practices
What came out of the forum on post-industrial media in relation to practice from Miles’ contribution, is that students work on developing ‘networked digital media practices’. What are those? How do they differ from industrial media practices? Miles provided this summary as a starting point:
“…here to know deeply is to know horizontally from managing software systems, updates, new platforms, codecs and standards through to recording sound and image, editing on a variety of systems, compression for different platforms and publishing online through the use of a variety of social and technical systems.”
So, what does this mean in an applied sense? This quote points towards developing the skills and knowledge needed to articulate and disseminate media in the network? What is the network? Is it computers, the Internet as the architecture and the web that runs on that architecture? How is it different to develop skills to work in this environment compared to for heritage/legacy media like traditional television and radio? How do the affordances of the this platform differ from television? What is the difference between social media services and a program broadcast on television?
A point was made about a shift to collaborating on the creation of services and working with communities, fans, audiences on the co-creation of content. What type of knowledge is required to make this shift?