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…