In Media Res

In Media Res is an experiment from the Institute for the Future of the Book's Media Commons project that uses short video clips and comments about them to "promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media scholarship."

A fuller description of the experiment is quoted below. You can view the posted videos and commentary on them on the In Media Res site.

Each day, a different media scholar will present a 30-second to 3-minute clip accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic response. The goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media scholarship through clips chosen for either their typicality or atypicality in demonstrating narrative strategies, genre formulations, aesthetic choices, representational practices, institutional approaches, fan engagements, etc.

In Media Res is envisioned as an experiment in just one sort of collaborative, multi-modal scholarship that MediaCommons will aim to foster. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we typically experience mediated texts. In Media Res hopefully will:

• Give scholars the opportunity to critically engage with the media in a more immediate and timely way.

• Promote discussion within the media studies community through virtual interactions around contemporary media artifacts.

• Enable a lively debate in which the sum total of the conversation will be more valuable than any one particular voice.

• Bridge the divide between academic and non-academic communities, inviting a critically-engaged and/or curious public to join in.

• Lead to the emergence of new scholarly and pedagogical ideas about studying and teaching media.

• Work toward reinvigorating the academic’s role as public intellectual by presenting media scholars no just as informed experts with valuable ideas to impart about critical media literacy, but as fellow citizens in a mediated society.