Speakers gathered from around the world for the inaugural Media Ecologies & Postindustrial Production Conference, held on 3rd November at the Innovation Forum at University of Salford (above). Funded by the Annual Disbursement Fund, Dr.Phoebe Moore organised the event with Michel Bauwens from Dhurakij Pundit University and Nathan Cravens of the P2P Research Group.
The conference speakers and delegates included both practitioners and academics who are committed to Media Ecology, a contemporary term that refers to the relationships and interactions between people online and media environments, and their relationships to the political and social contexts where global poverty and climate change are our biggest concerns. These spaces include fab labs, crowd-sourced democracy systems, mutualist monetary systems, open manufacturing and other concrete ideas for community building through the use of technology. The radical ideas of the Media Ecologies community have already begun to impact ideas for sustainable development and new practical platforms for production. The activities of this event are linked to the Global Justice Movement to develop and implement a viable alternative to neoliberalism (and in time, exchange trade economics) by applying commons based peer production more diligently, as a market neutral open source web based coordination platform.
The keynote speakers were Matthew Fuller of Goldsmiths University (author of Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture, MIT Press), and Michel Bauwens of Dhurakij Pundit University (Founder of the P2P Foundation) - both highly influential scholars in the research area of Media Ecology. These two researchers discussed the emergence and proliferation of a new form of production and value creation: peer production, where communities of volunteers and waged producers work to create (free) software/hardware and/or (open) content accessible to everyone. Within peer production, producers create products within a ‘commons’ or shared space, which can be used and modified by others who then return the product, thus improved, to the common pool. Producers often operate as a cooperative ecology between communities as well as the companies that create market-based spin-offs from that same commons.
The presentations developed a relationship between political, economic, and organisational questions posed by the P2P Foundation and the experimental cultural and philosophical drives, which underscore a lot of the work in the rapidly developing Media Ecologies field. Academics and practitioners who gave presentations included Sam Rose & Paul Hartzog of Flows, Smári McCarthy of Fab Labs, Dr. Eddie Kirkby of Manchester Fab Labs and University of Salford Visiting Fellow and Societás Founder & CEO Melissa Sterry.
The conference also marked the launch of the Peer to Peer Research Group, which is a new international knowledge hub for leaders in media ecology and post industrial production. Plans are underway for further seminars and workshops to discuss how the production techniques coming out of media ecologies offer the potential for real change in late capitalism.
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