The whole thing is so low-key that it almost seems embarrassing. Not an app. No campaign on Kickstarter. There isn’t any glossy packaging with a celebrity endorsement hidden in the back corner. A British scholar named David Gauntlett discreetly posted a set of printable cards (two PDF sheets totaling twelve cards) on the internet in 2006, but he somehow neglected to make them famous.
And yet, here we are. Teachers of media studies are still looking for them nearly twenty years later, graduate students are still sharing the PDFs, and the cards continue to appear in scholarly articles that discuss creativity, divergent thinking, and the peculiar, unsolvable challenge of making theory feel human. Gauntlett may not have fully anticipated what he had created. The most beneficial things can occasionally be produced almost by accident, in between larger projects, and with little fanfare.
The idea seems almost too straightforward. Each card summarizes, humanizes, and makes portable a media theorist’s main points. Stuart Hall in a single card. On the next, someone else. This is a format that you could hold in your hand during a seminar, slide across a desk, or debate with a classmate—the kind of thinkers that are typically buried inside dense academic texts. That physical attribute is more important than it might appear. There’s a reason why scholars researching LEGO’s role in design thinking consistently come to the same conclusions: people’s thinking opens up in ways that staring at a screen just does not produce when they touch, manipulate, arrange, and rearrange objects.
When a theorist’s name appears on a slide in most media studies classrooms nowadays, a certain kind of silence descends upon the students. That quiet was broken by Gauntlett’s cards, not loudly but persistently. According to a Wright State University professor, they are used in graduate courses to help students develop insider literacy, which is the kind of fluency where students start to laugh at the right jokes, follow the right arguments, and feel more like participants in a conversation than just observers. Even though it seems insignificant, this change is crucial to the educational process.
The extent to which the cards were permitted to stay specialized is what’s remarkable about this tale. By his own admission on his personal website, Gauntlett removed his previous online presence and replaced the majority of it with more recent work. He only restored the card PDFs after receiving feedback from those who had missed them. Something about that is subtly telling. These twelve cards continued to make their way back into classrooms, continue to be requested, and continue to matter despite the rapid advancements in academic fashions and the internet.
The contrast with what is typically praised in educational innovation is difficult to ignore. The well-funded pilot programs with their branded toolkits and conference presentations, the gamified platforms, the apps. There is no scaffolding in the David Gauntlett card set. It’s just an idea that was executed well, made publicly available, and trusted to reach those in need.
It’s still unclear if it will ever receive the greater attention it merits. However, it’s already doing something more uncommon than fame: it’s being utilized.
