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Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post- World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling alleys and other spaces where community members gathered. Might the political consciousness of the new generation be taking shape in and around popular culture? Are we seeing a blurring of the roles of citizen and consumer? Is this fusion between entertainment and news a good or a bad thing? What links exist between our cultural and our political preferences? How are activists and political leaders utilizing metaphors from popular culture as resources to mobilize their supporters? Is it possible that aspects of our popular culturemay generate utopian visions that fuel political change? These and other questions were explored by panelists Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC; David Carr, media and culture writer for the New York Times; and Stephen Duncombe, associate professor at NYU and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Henry Jenkins moderated.

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Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 11:00 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

From the Boston Globe article "'MST3K' crew is back for more movie mocking," describing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 event put on by CMS's Generoso Fierro and Jason Begy:

Three and a half hours into their appearance at MIT last month, Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu were determined to match their fans' dedication. They had given a nearly two-hour presentation on their creations - the bad-movie-bashing sci-fi comedy TV series "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and their current movie-mocking project, Cinematic Titanic - and almost all of the hundred or so fans stayed to stand in line for autographs. Hodgson and Beaulieu indulged a group that had made drawings of the "invention exchange" sketches from the show and beamed proudly at a kid, barely out of elementary school, wearing a "Mystery Science Theater" sweatshirt.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:25 AM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in tandem with commercially released family films, film adaptations of children's literature. He will also discuss why Walden Media as a film studio has recently moved into publishing children's literature as another platform for storytelling and content acquisition.

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Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 1:33 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

This talk, with Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explored the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of "fictive ethnicity" tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce used the example of the "Uru Diaspora," a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of "Uru Refugees," and referring to Uru as their "homeland."

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Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:54 AM in , Podcast | Permalink