Exploring possible future worlds with the practice of design fiction
Speculation as a means of critical distancing from the media

Une conférence de Géraldine Wuyckens (UC Louvain)

7 décembre 2022

Media Education Reloaded: From Mediagenic to Media Praxis

My starting point is a rather pessimistic viewpoint on Media Education: since the main goals of this discipline are now integrated into the very logic of the media themselves, what else can be expected from Media Education? In other words: since values such as “emancipation”, “transparency”, “participation” are now what define the core of legitimate discourse on media and in media, which critical perspectives could we still provide as media scholars, without being suspect of undermining the noble project endorsed by this discourse, in the very name of Media Education? Of course one could have a more optimistic, but maybe lazier, interpretation, which considers that the job of Media Education is actually done, and well done, by the media themselves, and that there is then nothing more to worry about. Let’s try to be neither pessimistic neither lazy.

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“Knowing the audience” on digital platforms

A platform, in its very nature, promises to make the entire communication chain transparent (and hence controllable). For content producers, this makes platforms an appealing environment to distribute their creations, since they offer the possibility to know their audiences. Most platforms therefore offer contributors insight into the reach of their creations, in the form of dashboards that contain audience metrics. This knowledge about the audience given to content creators is “interested”, in the sense that the knowledge is not random nor complete, and in its biases it is possible to detect a certain managerial logic.

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