Putting the social back in media

This week, I found a lot of articles about media, culture, and power and their influence on one another. Important subjects since a big aspect of climate action and sustainable design is figuring out how to make the dog wag the tail instead of the other way around.

🍄 How can people take a more active role in media?

This article helps tease out the answer to the question, "What is the role of media in the climate crisis?"

Rather than media being a tug-o-war between public and private sectors, Gaggio proposes creating a "public-private-plural" tripod to return balance and 'biodiversity' to our media ecosystems and give a voice back to citizens.

This transition is, in some way, starting to happen with the growth of ActivityPub and BlueSky's AT Protocol; these promising but as-of-yet-unproven decentralized protocols could help break down the walled gardens of social media. At the very least, they could help clear room for community spaces that resist commodification.

Read the article below 👇🏽

The mechanistic model of the world produced a global economy in which actions are constantly taken in the name of growth, regardless of their long-term impact on living systems. [Media literacy expert Antonio] Lopez reminds us that in order to address the ecological crisis, it is necessary "to transform our mental models from mechanism to something related to systems thinking and ecological intelligence." [...]

The remit of a public service is to grow cultural capital, but today economic capital is the only universally recognised value in the globalised world. [...]

There is a pattern. Companies break through by innovating, in content, technology, or service. They acquire a critical mass by creating value for customers, then shift their focus to delivering audiences to advertisers, and finally — if and when they reach a dominant position — turn to capture most of the value for their shareholders. Cory Doctorow memorably defined this process in the digital domain as "Enshittification".

For Mintzberg, restoring balance in society requires moving past two-sided politics and giving equal weight to three sectors: Public (political), Private (economic), and Plural (social), representing governments, businesses, and communities. The plural sector is not a middle way between the other two. It is made of communities, associations, cooperatives, NGOs, religious groups, movements and social initiatives. The critical difference is that none of it is owned by private companies or controlled by the government.

Read → Media Ecology by Federico Gaggio

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

We need to face the deep degenerative roots and entanglements in the causes of the Earth crisis. Without this, our efforts will just be ‘busy work’, or strategies for coping that achieve little. We will be always forcing a false balance between economy and society, or between nature and human needs. The media, campaign groups and institutions will be obsessing on one sub-crisis after another and pursuing token measures for them, ignoring the others. Moreover, they will continue to ignore the root causes rather than identifying leverage points to stop the harm.

→ Bridget McKenzie in The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis

[W]hile conventional efforts in energy efficiency and renewable energy are important parts of the sustainability puzzle, they will never be truly effective if we ignore the other half of the puzzle, which is our own hunger for physical power over the environment. [...] Until such time that we have the collective self-control to know when enough is actually enough, developing more powerful energy technologies will likely just feed our addiction to energy consumption and its corresponding environmental destruction.

→ Tom Greenwood in How much power do we actually need?

For businesses, the attraction of establishing abundance as a social and personal goal is that the goal can never be achieved. Human desire cannot be sated. No matter how much we get, it’s not going to be enough.

→ Nicholas Carr in All What Is Delicious to Man

👀 Finds we made along the way

Not quite the wheat, but not quite the chaff

Sublime is a collaborative mashup of are.na, obsidian, and notion
Seven core principles for intentional culture change
Designing Desirability: Making Sustainability Aspirational