Slow Media – Jennifer Rauch

Join us for a reading from Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable and Smart, a Nautilus Book Award winner described as  a “powerful corrective to media scholarship” (Chris Atton), a “spirited, sane, and savvy manifesto” (Carl Honoré), and a “compelling argument for how media can promote human existence more proportioned to human beings” (Douglas Rushkoff).

Jennifer Rauch’s Slow Media aims to transform the way we produce and use media, just as the Slow Food movement changed how people grow, buy and eat food. Her book helps readers understand complex relationships between everyday media choices, human well-being and the natural world. It propels conversations about how we can challenge the status quo — as users, consumers, and citizens. These alternative visions nurture a media ecosystem that is more satisfying for people and more sustainable for the planet.

The Slow Food movement has inspired people to apply principles like humanism, localism, simplicity, self-reliance and fairness to their use and production of media. Slow Media promotes alternatives to global, corporate media that are often unresponsive to the situated needs of human communities and natural environments. The Slow Journalism movement and the slogan “Good, Clean, Fair” provide an ethical framework for making the news industry more sustainable.

In this book, Rauch explores novel concepts such as Mindful Media, Green Media, and Post-Luddism. Mindful Media advocates for more contemplation in, and about, daily communication. It espouses practices like unplugging, monotasking, and sustained attention. Green Media debunks the myth that digital media are ecologically benign and seeks to reduce electronic waste and consumption of nonrenewable resources. Post-Luddism challenges the conventional wisdom that people skeptical of new technology are ignorant or afraid. Instead, it cultivates an informed, inclusive discussion about media’s socio–cultural impact.

For more than 15 years, Jennifer Rauch has explored alternative journalism, media activism, social protest coverage, rituals of media circulation and consumption, independent publishing, new communication technologies, and media audiences. She is a leading authority on the values and practices of people who read, watch and listen to activist and alternative media.

Rauch has published stories about media, journalism and communication with Medium, Thrive Global, Oxford University Press’s OUPblog, and Huffington Post. She created the blog Slow Media (slow-media.org) and curated the resource guide Unplug Your Class (unplugyourclass.com). She has been interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corp., Daily Beast, German public radio, Huffington Post Live, and other journalists worldwide. National Public Radio featured Rauch in two segments of Marketplace focused on the Slow Media movement and her yearlong project of taking an offline sabbatical.