what is MafAN
Mediatized Alternative Futures Academic Network (MAFAN) is an independent academic cluster that connects scholars, professionals, and vocal individuals (e.g., educators, creators, and industry practitioners) who are interested in exploring different narratives, practices, phenomena, and effects of alternative future media developed by the less powerful.
MAFAN can also be read as “MAFAN”, pronounced similarly to “麻烦” (troubles, problems, and disruptions) in Chinese. It provocatively implies the disruptive functions of alternative future media and mediatized alternative futures in challenging existing hegemony, monopoly, and privileged groups.
In this academic network, we aim to connect and communicate with people to bring creative ideas, inspiring dialogues, and some possible changes.
What is Mediatized alternative futures
The Notion of Mediatized Alternative Futures has three layers: Mediatization, Alternative Media, and Future Media.
Mediatization and alternative media have been well established concepts in academia. Mediatization highlights the influence of media on other social spheres such as politics, economics, and cultures, which is ambitious in centering the transformative role of media logics on wide range of social logics (Hjavard, 2013), while alternative media is characterized by its intention to serve specific communities and its focus on social change. It often emphasizes participatory journalism and grassroots production (Atton, 2002).
In comparison, future media is a still loosely defined notion which has huge potential for critical studies of media technologies. Future media is defined as the assemblage that incorporates both the existing, tangible, and accessible mediums or technical objects at the moment and the intangible discourses about its non-existing imagined ideal and ultimate type that is promised to be developed in the future. Compared to “new media” and “emerging media”, future media offers more potential to access the discursive, affective, and cultural power of imagination, vision, and narrative in the evolution of media technologies.
By combining these three layers, we wish to study mediatized alternative futures: exploring how people’s imaginations of utopia, dystopia, or heterotopia are mediatized in the alternative future media technologies.
what is alternative future media
It’s future media that are developed beyond the hegemonic structure and institutions (e.g., Start-up, Non-elitist/Grassroot-driven, Indie, Post-colonial/Global Southern, or Non-mainstream/Subcultural). Their very existence, activeness, and struggles are important in challenging the hegemonic power and their monopoly, creating and facilitating the diversity of future developments in media technologies, industry, and human society.
Meanwhile, we need to realize the possibilities that all alternative future media may turn into hegemonic present media. All mediatized alternative futures may turn into mediatized hegemonic presences. It requires us to be self-reflective dynamically all the time.
Mediatized Alternative Futures Academic Network 