People, things, ecologies: alienation as a driver for change in media

Changes in media production, sharing, distribution and consumption are often defined in dichotomies. This is obvious when we look at the television landscape. Traditional television is often perceived as mainstream media whereas user generated networked video services like YouTube as a critical counter-force where "users" are finally able to express their own creativity, opinions, beliefs in a networked and participatory way. Firstly, this theoretical reflection wants to emphasise that the media researcher and developer can think and work beyond this dichotomy (mainstream media vs new, networked or participatory media) through the confrontation of disciplinary insights, more specifically, by confronting people, tools, theories, insights and examples from media studies, cultural studies and contemporary and historical art, design and audiovisual practice. If we consider the example of television from an art historical perspective we clearly see that television has been used in an experimental, networked way from the start. The fact of being networked or not is in this example not dependent on the medium, but on the use of the medium. Secondly, we are convinced that the ethnographic procedure of alienation enables the researcher to break media open into its different elements [1] and to define the shifting mediascape as an ecology of people and tools (things), rather than a dichotomy. Subsequently we will try to focus in this paper on what drives and stimulates renewal of this media ecology and what the role of the media researcher and the media producer and -designer is in this matter. This paper results from a series of research projects in the Media and Design Academy working with the experience design approach (http://experiency.be/EN/index.php and http://c-md.khlim.be/). Experience design uses design ethnographic methods and confrontation of disciplines as core-elements in understanding media.