Embedded Files
Defining “media” as the intersections of technical knowledge, humanistic investments, social relations, economic models, political stakes, and aesthetic expression that people use to understand and shape their lives, MASTS is an interdisciplinary community of knowledge and action that aims to rigorously and playfully build better media infrastructures, strengthen public life, and advance social justice.
-- CONTEXT --
We live amidst simultaneous, unprecedented, intersecting societal challenges with an urgent need to understand and change our worlds in new ways.
While the pandemic unevenly wreaks havoc across longstanding racial, economic, and geographic inequalities, a crisis of democratic self-governance shows how urgently public institutions need to work across differences. Powerful technology companies deploy complex computational systems that defy human comprehension, while we struggle to understand, regulate, and hold them accountable. A worsening climate crisis is unfolding across seasons and geographies, demanding urgent collective action while harming the most vulnerable. And just when we need journalism to hold power accountable and build the rich conversations that fuel public life, the press struggles for financial stability and our ideas and practices around free speech are in flux.
Some of the fundamental things we need for strong public life—health, equality, accountability, truth, diversity, expertise—are most fragile exactly when we need them to meet urgent and complex social challenges.
-- OPPORTUNITY --
This fragility offers an opportunity. Knowing that people understand and shape their worlds through media, we can address these societal challenges by seeing and building media as sociotechnical infrastructures -- as convenings of technical knowledge, humanistic investments, social relations, economic models, political stakes, and aesthetic expressions that create public life.
This requires connecting people, knowledge, and action across traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, simultaneously valuing playful experimentation, intellectual inquiry, reflective practice, and inclusive community.
We stand a far better chance of building strong public life if media systems connect across crises, controversies, and theories of change.
-- HISTORY --
Starting with an informal 2017 workshop on algorithm ethics and building into a 2018 course on platforms and infrastructures, MASTS was formed at the University of Southern California as a collective of approximately 40+ undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty from 7 USC schools (Communication; Journalism; Letters, Arts & Sciences; Engineering; Cinematic Arts; Public Policy; Law) to study, critique, prototype, and deploy media infrastructures.
-- ACTIVITIES --
Through a mix of weekly meetings, project salons, skills sharing, guest lectures, reading groups, and social events, we convene people, knowledge, and action across USC and beyond to build short-term interventions and long-term initiatives.
Our investigations can take the form of academic studies, journalistic storytelling, futures narratives, policy recommendations, public campaigns, guerilla art, system prototypes, public events, learning spaces – and any other modes of engagement that create insight and impact.
-- JOIN US --
If you're a member of the USC community, please contact us if you're interested in joining the group! Our mailing list is our primary way of connecting, and it's open to anyone at USC.
Page updated
Report abuse