The Slow Media movement has been growing slowly for a decade or so. It is something advocates slow production and consumption of media through the press, on blogs, even on Facebook. It is started as resistance against global, corporate media. It is all set for a sudden and quick leap of popularity with the launch of a new book on its principles and functioning.
Jennifer Rauch, an award-winning Long Island University faculty member, has written a new book titled, Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable and Smart. The book explains how this movement coalesced and why it is now poised to change how people use and produce media, just as Slow Food transformed how we grow, buy and eat food.
Slow Media enables readers to understand the complex relationships between their everyday media choices, social well-being and the natural world. Jennifer Rauch, a professor of Journalism and Communication Studies at LIU Brooklyn, explains why our media habits and systems are founded on an unsustainable growth paradigm that depletes human and ecological resources. She aims to propel new conversations about how we can challenge the status quo—as users, consumers, and citizens.
“Slow Media helps people see that ‘slow’ is about finding the right tempo for making and engaging with media, about the joy of alternating between slower and faster speeds,” Rauch said. “I hope the book will help readers to use media in ‘slow’ ways that are socially and environmentally sustainable, that are good for people and for the planet.”
She points to recent crowd-funding successes of “slow news projects” like The Correspondent (U.S.) and Tortoise (U.K.) as evidence that the time is ripe for slow approaches to journalism.
