SPECULATION!

The idea of ‘speculation’ in Networked Media has been mentioned many times. It’s a very different way of thinking about education and the weaving workflows of media articles on our blogs. It’s utterly counter-intuitiuve to any prior learning most students, and certainly I, have done. A la Adrian Miles:

Education is not consumerism.

Be a knowledge producer, not content consumer.

Here the focus is on looking forward, instead of reflecting away at what has been and past. Last week in the lecture, Adrain made it clear that we are the engineering students of the 1920’s, that is, we are situated for pioneering radical change because of the subject of our education and the times we are in. We are young, forward thinking, technologically savvy and in debt = let us soothe your inadequacy, old man, and propel your business into the new age of media communications.

This idea of speculation only sunk in for me this week, when a quote by legendry filmmaker Dziga Vertov came to mind. He wrote:

WE affirm the future of cinema art by rejecting its present.

To me, this is such a radical statement. I think this is the space of speculation in media education, and what Adrian Miles had in mind. When Vertov made this declaration, he made a comment not only on the revolutionary potential of the medium of cinema, but of the emancipatory potential of realism in art. Relevantly, the act of engaging in speculative media practices can be liberating, insightful and forward thinking while still remaining grounded in reality. Initially I had trouble understanding the emphasis on speculation, imagining I’d have to free write dystopic science-fiction…

2 comments
  1. […] video, communications strategies and ideas into meaningful wholes. Wow – liberating in the Dziga Vertov kinda way! The term designer in this sense lends itself to connotations in the ruminative fields […]

  2. […] We are the engineering students of the 20′s! – adaptivity, ideas, innovation, vision, creativity, care, curation – this is the space of Networked Media. But why lock it down and locate it? The unique recipe combinations of IfThisThenWhat.com from today’s tutorial are testament to the intertwined, evolving nature of content sharing on The Network – it’s boundaryless. Weaving information together, like in curation, is seamlessly managed by clean interfaces optimised for only essential viewing (RSS). In the same way I might find myself speculating a solution on the job, Adrian asked us to think of our ideal ‘What if…’ if I could do anything on my blog imaginable. Then he systematically demonstrated how each speculative request could for the most part, be achieved (such as, automatically post my Instagram pictures to my blog when I share them on Instragram). The exercise demonstrated Model II behaviour by changing the question being asked instead of the method used to solve the problem: why begin at the start? Why not begin with a speculative ‘What if?’ no matter how far away in the future-y future its likelihood may appear? To use an example from the lecture, these processes are rewiring our brains from planning exceedingly logical essays to learning through practice in the most non-linear of ways. […]

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