ABSTRACT
Slow Media is an early twenty-first-century cultural intervention that fosters greater mindfulness of how media affect both the lifeworld and the real world. This chapter examines how Slow Media cultivates an ecomedia perspective by stimulating disengagement from digital media that impair perceptions of physical reality. Slow Media offers strategies for increasing one’s critical awareness of—and one’s actual distance from—media content, forms, and their consumerist sponsors. The Slow goal of using media less aligns with the ecological quest to find less consumptive ways of living. Slow Media encourages people not only to engage with print and analog media that employ complex physical senses and movements but also to reconnect with material realities, natural environments, and local communities. Influenced by the Slow Food movement, this approach encourages eco-mindful consumption grounded in knowledge of how media products are made, i.e., their provenance. By adopting Slow Media practices, people can transform their perceptions of time and space, develop new ethical sensibilities, and better synchronize their personal rhythms with the natural world in ways that nurture environmental sustainability.
