Media seem to be dissolving into what they’ve always been substitutes for, namely, personal relations. The reabsorption of media back into the base medium of communication is generating interesting phenomena all around: fake news, massive data gathering and privacy breaches, obvious partisanship presented as neutral positions, addictive UX design, and so on. In my opinion, these convulsions signal a budding systemic awareness that the jig is up on getting so much for so little.

Thresholds for attention and arousal are steadily adjusting to ambient levels of constant noise. This means that standing out requires drama at conspiracy theory scale. But media grew by exploiting a very basic human susceptibility to sights and sounds, which in turn trigger sentiment. The moment manipulators figured out that shadows were enough to move substance, the game was on.

Making media from the place we are encourages us to reframe the relationships we have with media. The first part of the concept captures the current, open ethos of creativity that remains unassailable regardless of all the machinations behind the scenes of social media. We tend to acquiesce to the descriptions of our activity on these channels without realizing that we’re not just being milked by data hoarding companies, we are also using these channels to make and distribute our own media.

The second part of the concept (“from the place we are”) means to wrest psychological control over the geographical locus of yourself, so to speak. The term “geographical” is generalized beyond physical environments to include social and affective environments. In short, “Making media…” is a deliberate practice meant to reverse the thrust of traditional media, whose crowning achievement has been to induce personality shifts through outlandish mimetic representations of sentiment. For the price of a little exposure to these fictions, our sentiment readily gives up the substance.

But reclaiming the substance, means reclaiming ourselves. Activities like “Making media…”, in this age of proliferating shadows, look a lot like love. And love, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery says is “…the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.”