– This is nothing less than the largest demo event in the history of Media City Bergen, said professor Lars Nyre from the University of Bergen.
On August 17th 2023 he and his team of seven invited over 390 media researchers from the Nordic countries for an intellectual exchange of thoughts on media innovation. The interactive exhibition was staged with support from Media Futures, NordMedia, TekLab and Media City Bergen.
Big questions ran through the exhibition: Will media scholars be able to make an impact on the media landscape of the future? Or are we suffering from future shock? We asked six media researchers from Nordic countries what they think. They are Bigir Guðmundsson from Iceland, Turo Uskali and Randa Romanova from Finland, Gudrun Austli and Melanie Magin from Norway, and Roman Horbyk from Sweden.
Here we present their answers as a video and a written story.
The video interview was made by reporter Janina Wildermuth and video producers Nora Storebø and Lone Nyløkken.
Just below the stairs, between the weather machine and the VR animator, stood Professor Bigir Guðmundsson from Akureyri University in Iceland. Even though he had barely seen a prototype in detail, he still seemed amazed at the amount of interesting presentations that lay ahead. When we approached him to talk about the concept of future shock, he was more than familiar and well prepared to answer.
"I know that the future is surprising and that we have to keep up with it can be shocking. I remember I was standing in front of a fax machine and thought this is changing the world," he said.
Likely fascinated was Guðmundsson from Javad Khajavis project, the VR Animotor made at the Volda University College.
"I find VR really excited. I am looking into political communication and thats where you have the development of social media which is rapid. Technology in that sense is my research field, so I am new to VR and AR"
He thinks the media will always be existing amongst us humans in one form or another. With great eyes he said that we are totally mediatized and we will even more become increasingly technologized.
Down in the foyer we stumbled upon associate professor Turo Uskali from the Department of Linguistics and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He was simply astonished by the quality and variation of the projects presented. Especially the so-called "Pastfinder" caught his interest as it shows the possible reuse of radio archive footage for education. The project, created by PhD student Rebecca Nedregotten Strand, uses radio archive footage of the heritage sites in the area on the Dovre Mountain Plateau to create location-based storytelling as an augmented full-body experience while hiking there.
"I am truly amazed by this project. I see potential for several remote places and how I could use it in my work since I am focussing on immersive and drone journalism," Uskali said.
He has been studying virtual reality for over five years in Finland and is part of a media project based in Bergen where they conduct research on how to use innovative media in combination with journalism.
"Last year my students used the Oculus Quest devices to test whether VR can be good for storytelling. They fully immerged into the VR world and even though some became motion sick, the response was mostly positive," he tells.
For Uskali media innovation such as presented on Future Fest is not a shocking, but an opportunity.
"I see many futures for media innovation, but I think it is most important to pay more attention to the younger generation. In Finland we see that youngsters cannot watch youtube videos anymore. Tiktok is the new norm and anything longer than 1 minute will be skipped. It is challenging to create content about relevant topics in such a compact form. Furthermore it also needs to be entertaining to reach them," he said.
Gudrun Austli originally from Snåsa in Trøndelag, was one of the newest faces at the demo-event. She was just starting her master in script developing after working many years as a film producer. She was not familiar with the term future shock when we confronted her in front of the cosy but bizarre music pillows and was not sure whether media scholars can overcome it. However, Austli felt inspired by the prototypes and was thinking of how she can create content with innovative media.
"What we saw lately from media industry is that it is fragmented. We are not becoming a big community, but I hope we can come back to a united media spectre or world."
Not having seen yet all prototypes she mentioned SitSim as something interesting looking. It reminded her of thoughts she had when walking around streets, and thinking about storytelling.
"I see that images are not that developed but I can truly imagine people can make historical films with that technology," she said.
Not far away from the Auditomosjon stand chatted Roman Horbyk, senior lecturer at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Örebro University in Sweden with his colleagues. Horbyk acknowledged that we are witnessing a profound change in everyday life. Fast technological evolution and the total medialization of everything we do are two of his examples mentioned.
"I am sure that the future of media will still be depending on us humans even though the technology agency of the machine that we are witnessing is on the rise. I guess we will see more and more communication which will be even more entangled with everything. Mediation and medialisation will change the way we are doing things. I would love to say the future is also promissing for humanity but actually I am not quite sure about that.", he said.
Horbyk has seen projects which are similar to the idea of the protypes on the Future Fest before but is happy to see how the technology has evolved. According to him there are new interfaces and human machine interaction is expanding to embrace new spheres. He talked about a more traditional use of AR to represent historical sights which he experiences as exciting when it comes to the implementation of the latest technology.
"Seeing that there is progress from a purely technical perspective is really intresting to me. I see that AR and more traditonal communication technology is becoming more used everywhere. This is something we have to react to or with other words we have ti adapt to the new landscape where everything is entangled with communication in a very high technological way," he explained.
Just when Turo Uskali turned we run into the grant-funded Doctoral Researcher Randa Romanova from the University of Helsinki. Similar to her colleague, she was fascinated by the protoypes she saw.
"The first one was related to the transformation of education and how they reshape the exam process. This project was from students at the University of Stavanger. The other one was about animation and how they create it in VR from Volda. This is mindblowing for me because I am not from the field.", she said.
For her the future of media is a shift from traditional practices such as verbal communication, video and audio communication to something advanced like VR, AR, and this will be integrated in the media field. It doesnt matter if we like it or not, we have to adapt.
"We experience an increased information flow and different platforms and sources where you get information. The discrepancy of amateur and professional content producer can create a shock of what to trust and which media I want to use. Future shock is a huge concept which can be applied to many aspects."
Melanie Magin is professor in Media Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim and is generally impressed by the student projects at the Future Fest. The "Schizophrenia" project had the biggest impact on her, leaving her scared but also curious.
"It is interesting to see how people feel the sickness. It's really helpful to develop empathy and better understand those mental states.", Magin stressed.
Another project she mentioned was "SitSim" as a project displaying realistic visualizations of ancient structures that are no longer visible in the landscape. Magin thought immediately of her children who would like it right away.
"It is often diffiuclt to imagine how ruins looked. I live in Trondheim and I would be interested to see how the old fortress in the city looked before and I think this would be especially fun for my children to experience the ruins in VR.", she sayed.
For Magin media scholars are simply not prepared to deal with all the new media or rather they do not have the adequate methods yet.
"I think we must be open towards a new world, but also aware of new problems. I see it as a problem that large tech-companies are not open to share their data or code with us academics. They usually do not make their data accessable for researchers like us. In the past when we were researching journalism we could just open a newspaper and read, but now the raw data will be selectively given to others rather than to be publicy available to us researchers", she continues:
"I think politicians should set up rules so that it is not only tech-companies deciding our kind of research."
