CMS News Archives

From Professor Jenkins' blog:

On Monday, I announced to the members of the Comparative Media Studies Community -- our graduate and undergraduate students, staff, researchers, faculty, and alums -- that I will be leaving MIT at the end of the current academic year to accept a new position at the University of Southern California. I have decided that the phrase "bitter-sweet" is inadequate for such a moment, prefering to adopt the phrase, "Brutal-Sublime" to capture the extreme highs and lows I feel at what is for me a significant transitional moment in my life. This turned out to be one of the most agonizing decisions I've ever had to make.

Read more at Confessions of an Aca-Fan . . .

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 4:25 PM in Announcements | Permalink

The Obama campaign's extensive deployment of digital media, especially its tech-savvy outreach to the young, was widely reported before the election. Some predicted that this digital advantage would make a decisive difference. Did it? What role did the Internet play in the election? How has it changed presidential politics? What are the future implications of the impact of new media on journalism and on American society? These and other questions will be addressed by Marc Ambinder, who covers politics for The Atlantic; Cyrus Krohn, the director of the National Republican Committee's eCampaign; and Ian V. Rowe, who headed up MTV's coverage of the presidential election.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum

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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Campaign & the Media 2"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:15 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Jesper Juul, a Gambit game researcher, spoke with University of Buffalo doctoral candidate Kevin Lim this week on the growth of "casual games," simpler video games that are often as satisfying as their complex, blockbuster counterparts.

Continue reading "Jesper Juul and the Casual Revolution" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 11:06 AM in | Permalink

Geoffrey Long, Communications Director at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, in "The Q factor: How the science behind James Bond's gadgets was reinvented":

Since the franchise was rebooted with 2006's "Casino Royale," however, there have been Draconian cutbacks to Q branch. That may be because movie audiences may be too jaded to appreciate fantastical doohickeys, said Geoffrey Long of the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab via email.

"Given the two-plus years of development time required to take such a film from script to cineplex, it's become incredibly difficult for sci-fi to keep coming up with mind-blowing yet somewhat feasible new gizmos and gadgets," said Long. "If Bond does indeed have an amazing supercomputer in 'Quantum,' I for one will be keenly interested in seeing what it can do - and then seeing if my own laptop can outdo it."

From the New York Daily News . . .

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 12:01 PM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

This perhaps marks the beginning of a trend where marketers and film-makers move from plain vanilla deals that toss brands into a script to ones that are integrated seamlessly into the story.

"The film, through the reach of Bollywood, will be our ambassador abroad," says Verve's editorial director Parmesh Shahani. "And in many ways, our ambassador here as well."

The magazine, on its part, has taken the deal a notch further, with its November issue dubbed as a Dostana special. It has at least 40 pages devoted to the subject, including the magazine cover inspired by the Karan Johar film, interviews with Chopra, director Tarun Mansukhani, fashion shoots on film sets in Miami and at Film City in Goregaon, and fashion and beauty features inspired by the Dostana theme. The film also gets a special mention in the editor's column.

From Mint (India) . . .

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:48 AM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

The new Center for Future Civic Media (C4) site, at civic.mit.edu, not only serves as the public face of C4 but also reflects its collaborative mission: to develop new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action, serve as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media, and coordinate community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

The new site encourages the free sharing of civic media tools. MIT-made tools--including the group decision-making tool Selectricity and a tool to report acts of civic courage, called Hero Reports--are currently featured, but so are tools submitted by others, such as IBM's visualization program, Many Eyes. The site's central aim is to highlight others' civic media tools, to give them a platform for sharing and improvement.

Visitors to the site are encouraged to follow the work of Center for Future Civic Media's researchers, partners, and students through its blog and its many events. And they can discuss civic media issues, ideas, and challenges in the site's public forums.

About the Center for Future Civic Media

The Center for Future Civic Media supports research at MIT to innovate civic media tools and practices and test them in communities. Bridging two established programs at MIT--one known for inventing alternate technical futures, the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change--the Center for Future Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. It is made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

Transforming civic knowledge into civic action is an essential part of democracy. As with investigative journalism, the most delicate and important information can often focus on leaders and institutions that abuse the trust of the communities they serve. By helping to provide people with the necessary skills to process, evaluate, and act upon the knowledge in circulation, civic media ensures the diversity of inputs and mutual respect necessary for democratic deliberation. Some of what emerges here looks like traditional journalism, while some moves in radical new directions.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:32 AM in Announcements | Permalink

Continue reading "Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab wins Microsoft 2008 Dream-Build-Play Competition" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:05 PM in Announcements | Permalink

Tak Toyoshima's comic strip Secret Asian Man has brought to light the challenges of being Asian American in America. Challenges like not being able to find his name on a key chain at souvenir shops, being asked where he was delivering the Chinese food that he just picked up and being his friend's default camera technician. In 2007, SAM began syndication through United Features and has since become a daily strip featured in papers across the country. SAM's focus has broadened beyond purely Asian-American race relations, and now discusses themes that involve dynamics between groups to which we all belong: race, gender, political, religious, left-handed, sexual orientation, dog people...etc. In this informal presentation, Toyoshima explores the relationship between his preferred content (the exploration of Asian-American identity), his medium (comics), and his mode of distribution (syndication primarily through independent newspapers). How does Secret Asian Man address the historical role of racial stereotypes in comics as a medium? What might his experiences as an independent comics producer tell us about the opportunities offered by alternative media?

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Tracking Secret Asian Man"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:50 PM in , Podcast | Permalink