"Launch: Pause for Thought Website"

Announcing the launch of pauseforthought.net, the project website for Pause for Thought: Media Literacy in an Age of Incessant Change.

The world seems to change so rapidly, it often feels hard to keep up - especially in the realm of media technology. Platforms, devices, apps, and other media forms all seem to emerge and then obsolesce with dizzying rapidity. Should we see the inability of practice to keep up with technological change as some kind of failure? Should we leave the question of how we live with technology to those who impose it upon us? Or can we view our experience and our practices as points of departure for a more constructive critique of the high-speed society? Those of us who work with media frequently devise and use strategies for adapting to and managing the pressures of this high-speed society. We see this as a form of ‘media literacy’ that isn’t confined to institutional settings, like university classrooms. pauseforthought.net is a platform for sharing critical, reflective, and creative literacies and strategies developed through academic and non-academic media practices, broadly defined.

The aim of the Pause for Thought is to create an interdisciplinary network of scholars, writers, artists, and media practitioners who are invested in the future of media literacy in our high-speed society. With pauseforthought.net, we will be collating a rolling series of creative and reflective contributions, developed primarily through two online workshops including academic and non-academic participants, that outline methods and strategies for dealing with rapid media change.

Current contributions include a report on our first workshop and contributions by Emma Cocker, Paula Morison, and Pause for Thought’s investigators, Thomas Sutherland and Scott Wark. Forthcoming contributions include reflections or responses by Sam Meech, Niall Docherty and Zara Dinnen, JR Carpenter, Jess Henderson, and Erica Scourti, with more to be announced. The Pause for Thought project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their Research Networking Scheme grant, and is supported by the University of Lincoln and the University of Warwick. pauseforthought.net was designed and created by rectangle.design.