What can you do to further the cause of Slow Media, as a citizen, student, colleague, and consumer?
- Just make time for enjoying print and analog media, as well as unmediated experiences.
- Experiment with vintage techniques that will stretch and exercise your brain, like Slow Reading, Slow Listening, keeping a paper journal, or navigating by map.
- Be mindful about the email you send, check messages less frequently, and turn off alerts to the extent possible.
- Develop habits like breathing, monotasking, and taking breaks whenever you use fast media.
- Set some parameters for building Slow intervals into your schedule, even for a few hours.
- Practice empathy for people whose media habits, schedules, lifestyles, and tempos might differ from your own.
That’s the easy part. Then there’s becoming a green media consumer and citizen, which means recognizing that media use and production involves limits and that planetary resources are finite.
- Resist buying media that you don’t need and reuse what you can.
- Consume media products and services from companies that follow sustainable practices.
- Support people who produce magazines, journalism, films, websites, and other media products in ethical ways.
- Dispose of digital devices responsibly.
- Learn some basics of environmental science and become comfortable with a new vocabulary of consumption.
- Get familiar with processes that take place invisibly behind your screens.
- Do some research, using resources like Greenpeace’s Click Clean Reports and GoodElectronics’ website.