A Manifesto for Media & Global Change
Introducing the SMS: The Salzburg Media School
Distrust in our basic institutions seems to be heading for a breaking point. Politicians rail against media. Trust in government is at all time lows. Polarization and hostile dialog in digital media spaces seem to be increasing with each new act of terrorism and as each wave of refugees enters western nations. Meanwhile, politicians are claiming to rekindle something that is seemingly lost, figments of nations more prosperous and powerful in decades past .
This crisis of legitimacy knows no borders. In cities, urban coastal elites struggle to understand how and why the fabric of civil society is fraying. In rural parts of the world, increasing global inequality and the disruption of working class living wages has eroded core mechanisms for well being and livelihood. While this crisis of institutional legitimacy spans organizations across the world, media organizations are under particular pressure to maintain relevance, pursue dynamic storytelling, and to reach and impact communities. It is within this time of deep distrust, polarization, and crisis of legitimacy that news media become both central facilitators for civic information and communication needs while also being subject to attacks by politicians and citizens who question the core fundamental objective of news and the role of legacy and alternative media in contemporary civic and political discourse.
News organizations, journalists and storytellers must navigate a landscape rife with polarizing rhetoric, self-selecting networked communities of homogenous dispositions, and a digital media infrastructure that increasingly targets personal preference through algorithmic design. We have seen the effects of these new pressures in how citizens increasingly congregate in like-minded online communities and question sources of information delivered to them through layers of peer sharing. The emergence of alternative media platforms masked as news outlets, combined with the emergence of “fake news” operations that use data and algorithm to perpetuate false narratives and target specific audiences, has perpetuated a media landscape saturated with turmoil, uncertainty, and doubt.
At the same time, those who teach about and with media find themselves under increasing pressure to respond to the current wave of disruption in the industry, maintaining criticality and relevance while trying to understand the short and long term implications of the plight of media organizations in a time of intense partisanship and a return to civic tribalism of sorts. The struggle for teachers to find avenues for engagement with and response to the current state of media calls for more innovative approaches to pedagogy, a focus on application of pedagogy into community, and a need to understand scholarship as practice and intervention-oriented. This need is ever more prescient in a time when institutes of higher education are trading criticality for skill, theory for tools, and relationships for transactions.
To respond to this landscape, the faculty and practitioners who have been supporting the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change for the past decade, are coming together to launch SMS: the Salzburg Media School. SMS will bring together leading thinkers, teachers and activists to reimagine how media pedagogy, practice and research can embrace our current moment and define a new approach to social change through civic media literacies. SMS will adhere to the following missions:
- To build capacity for pedagogy that lies at the intersection of skills and theory, and that approaches learning from a point of critical consciousness.
- To approach research not through the production of knowledge cut off from the world, but applied and situated in the communities it studies.
- To think of media practice as intervention into traditional models of storytelling that desperately need to be re-imagined for the present day.
- To re-imagine narratives that push back against harmful extremist rhetoric and post fact cultures.
SMS sits at the intersection of these missions and will create and sustain capacity that talks across cultures, borders and divides to set a new course for critical pedagogy and practice in civic media literacies. To activate these missions, SMS will pursue four specific objectives:
- Critical Experimental Pedagogy — SMS teaches courses that are experimental in delivery, and that approach pedagogy from the standpoint of critical consciousness, in which “individuals develop the ability to perceive their social reality not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.”
- Intervention-based Practice — The work of SMS is deeply embedded in the practice of community empowerment. The type of practice employed by SCMS works with communities to help solve problems, provide voice, and give power to those who have been marginalized.
- Cross-Border/Cross-Cultural Applied Research — SMS works to build new knowledge about media practice and pedagogy in ways that respond to the realities of media and information flows that are borderless, embedded in networks, and that oscillate between private and public, between fact and interpretation. Our research aims to provide new knowledge and themes for exploring the impact of media makers on daily life.
- Media Literacy and Civic Capacity — SMS will work to position media and digital literacies as critical and necessary foundations for sustained positive social impact and for the inclusion of all citizens in their societies.
SMS launches at the 2018 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, where we will be exploring Populism and its impact on the current media landscape. At this 3 week convening, the faculty of SMS will come together to set an agenda and course of work, and welcome other practitioners, educators, and applied scholars to join us as we push to establish a new approach to media practice and pedagogy that places emerging leaders in positions of power, hope, and good.
