Our students make MEDLab work.
Study with us
Do you know someone looking to hone their skills in making social change with media? Is that you?
The beating heart of MEDLab is the MAPE program—the MA in Media and Public Engagement at CU Boulder. It is a two-year interdisciplinary program that spans traditional boundaries between theory and practice, geared toward civic engagement and community building. This is not a cookie-cutter experience. MAPE can be highly customized to supporting the goals of self-motivated, creative student leaders. We pride ourselves in honoring diverse career paths, from professions and grassroots activism to further academic work. And, of course, interested MAPE students are welcome to join MEDLab as research fellows.
If you're interested in learning more, join us for a virutal info session on November 7. Register here.
If you are able to support our students financially, please contact us or donate here.
Looks Like New: Deep mediatization
Our radio show, Looks Like New, airs across Colorado's Front Range tonight at 6 p.m. on 88.5 FM. If you can't catch it then, subscribe to the podcast. Here's what's on this month:
Back in the early 1990s, the British scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron outlined what they saw as the "Californian Ideology"—a kind of implicit worldview then beginning to take shape in Silicon Valley. In some respects, the Californian ideology has infected all of us. Meanwhile, however, politics has become all the more charged and polarized and frustrated. The utopian promises of California seem to be getting more and more dystopian. Media scholar Andreas Hepp has traveled from Germany, where he lives and works, to California with that old essay in hand. He has been exploring what has become of the Californian Ideology, as well as the "pioneer communities" still promising to shape the future of the world through technology.
An archive of deceased crypto projects
What be learned from crypto projects that failed in practice but bear important lessons for future designs?
Life in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies moves quickly. Projects come and go. In markets full of volatility and speculation, success or failure is not always the clearest indicator of the quality of the underlying ideas. Important ideas may appear in a given project alongside the lousy ones that doom it. Lousy ideas, also, may seem to flourish because they appeared at an opportune time. Regardless of the quality of an idea, it can bear lessons.
MEDLab's newest pilot project, Crypto Wake, is an archive of inactive, failed, and otherwise deceased crypto projects with lessons worth remembering. It is a collaborative wiki that welcomes contributions from those who remember or who are learning to do so.
See the pilot website at cryptowake.xyz.
