Media Education Summit (MES) 2013 – Sarah Pink

Media Education Summit 2013
Sarah Pink

Sheffield was the venue for this year’s Media Education Summit. Collated here are a series of posts with fragments, observations and provocations from key notes and presentations. More here: David Buckingham, Susan Orr, Natalie Fenton.

Sarah Pink
Skyping in from Australia – talked about new ways of accounting for the sensory affordances of digital media. Doing Visual Ethnography – new edition in Nov 2013 – attends to more than just the use of digital visual methods/tools in research settings, to open up a new field of practice – how the digital environment feels and the implications of this for the production of knowledge. An ethnographic approach focussing on reflexive sensory perception opens up an engagement with the relations between the visual, the digital and the material throughout the research process.

Researching the perceptible socio-sensory and the invisible digital infrastructures that shape our world, beyond engagement with digital content, helps us to understand digital readiness and presence (eg. the notion of the standby button) and otherwise tacit meanings and purposes. These understandings could move thinking on in this and other disciplines.

The terms of reference – such as visual ethnography – are not perfect (eg. where’s the audio?) but it’s important to keep track of how the meaning of such terms shift in tandem with how we choose to use them and in what contexts.

Relevance to my study: I can see this being relevant to my study in relation to the effect ‘iPad presence’ has in the classroom dynamic. It’s early days and there is much excitement and anticipation. There is more on this here.