Slow Media: Why "Slow" Is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart

by Jennifer Rauch

Today we recognize that we have a different relationship to media technology--and to information more broadly--than we had even five years ago. We are connected to the news media, to our jobs, and to each other, 24 hours a day. But many people have found their mediated lives to be too fast, too digital, too disposable, and too distracted. This group--which includes many technologists and young people--believes that current practices of digital media production and consumption are unsustainable, and works to promote alternate ways of living.

Until recently, sustainable media practices have been mostly overlooked, or thought of as a counterculture. But, as Jennifer Rauch argues in this book, the concept of sustainable media has taken hold and continues to gain momentum. Slow media is not merely a lifestyle choice, she argues, but has potentially great implications for our communities and for the natural world. In eight chapters, Rauch offers a model of sustainable media that is slow, green, and mindful. She examines the principles of the Slow Food movement--humanism, localism, simplicity, self-reliance, and fairness--and applies them to the use and production of media. Challenging the perception that digital media is necessarily eco-friendly, she examines green media, which offers an alternative to a current commodities system that produces electronic waste and promotes consumption of nonrenewable resources. Lastly, she draws attention to mindfulness in media practice-- "mindful emailing" or "contemplative computing>," for example--arguing that media has significant impacts on human health and psychological wellbeing.

Slow Media will ultimately help readers understand the complex and surprising relationships between everyday media choices, human well-being, and the natural world. It has the potential to transform the way we produce and use media by nurturing a media ecosystem that is more satisfying for people, and more sustainable for the planet.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2018

About the author

Jennifer Rauch is an award-winning writer, educator and researcher focusing on alternative media, media activism and popular culture. Her book, "Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable and Smart," aims to transform how we use and produce media just as Slow Food changed the way we grow, buy and eat food. Rauch has talked about Slow, green and mindful media practices with NPR’s Marketplace, Huffington Post, Medium, Radio National (Australia), The Daily Beast, and other press worldwide. She is a professor of Journalism and Communication Studies at Long Island University Brooklyn and a judge of the Polk Awards for excellence in journalism.

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Primitivism. Emotional without bothering to mimic reason too much. Nothing wrong with it, but, given the context of 2019, I smell some new laws in the next decade. Something to protect those who are smart because they are unable to cope with the current system.

[Jennifer Rauch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tempted to give it five stars in honor of the five times I've read it this year for editing, proofreading, indexing, and whatnot.

[Joey · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book length treatment of a blog post about a blog that was about a blog post based around a pamphlet that was turned into a blog by three Germans. Is this the state of publishing? THIS gets a book deal? Much more cautious of Oxford titles going forward.

[Julian Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, communications and journalism professor Jennifer Rauch does quite a good job for advocating that we slow down our media consumption, along a number of dimensions: reducing the quantity of information we consume, eliminating multitasking, considering using analog media instead, savoring the media that we do consume, and so on. "Media" is defined much more broadly here than the common, colloquial meaning: it is chiefly a stand-in for fast-paced, digital technologies, more akin to how Marshall McLuhan would have used the word. (Rauch notes that, in contrast to the perception that McLuhan was a proponent of technology, he was actually quite a skeptic.)

Much of what Rauch talks about here resonated with me: the more media we consume, particularly in a FOMO manner, the more burned out we become, and the less likely we are to be knowledgeable about specific topics. Look at American society today: people will gleefully state that they don't know very much about a subject but won't hesitate to immediately offer you their quarter-baked opinions on the same. Sadly, the last seven years since Rauch wrote this book don't offer much optimism that things will change. The mass media environment is increasingly dominated by a small number of right-wing billionaire controlled platforms (News Corporation, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.), while most consumers are "amusing themselves to death" with vapid content delivered through TikTok -- now much of it AI-generated slop. Unlike eating bad food, individuals don't immediately feel the effects of mindlessly consuming garbage media, until they wake up five or ten years from now and wonder why their country is a dictatorship controlled by a clown directly from garbage reality television. (Oh, oops, that already happened!)

So "slow" media has a branding problem, something that Rauch and others have not truly been able to transcend, hence why almost nobody knows about this movement. It's great that there are small groups of individuals pushing back against mass media and platformization, and perhaps they will live healthier and calmer lives. But try convincing an entire country that, among other things, a 24-hour endless news cycle is actively harmful. The population is too busy multitasking to absorb, in depth, a different approach.