Podcast: "Anecdotes from a Lifetime of Electronic Product Creation"
A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cited numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and drew some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.
Boston Phoenix highlights Media Lab work, including Center for Future Civic Media
In 2006, Alyssa Wright, then a Media Lab student studying mapping, tackled a similar goal: she created a walking memorial in Boston to commemorate civilian deaths in Iraq. Shocked at the "astronomical" discrepancy between the actual civilian death count (she estimates it was up to 250,000) and what Americans thought the death count was (around 9000, she says), Wright wanted to make an impact. So she hit the streets with an exploding backpack.
"We really don't have a sense of what it's like in someone else's shoes, but technology can bridge that gap," says Wright, who tracked media-reported deaths in Baghdad and overlaid them onto a map of Boston. When she wandered into an area of the city that corresponded with a Baghdad death, her backpack exploded with white confetti, each piece inscribed with the name of someone who'd died.
These days, Wright is channeling her tech-meets-art-meets-protest angle into Hero Reports, a Manhattan-based Web operation that tracks courageous moments among everyday people by collecting e-mails, phone calls, and letters, and then mapping positive news. It's a direct counterbalance to New York City's "See Something, Say Something" campaign, which encourages people to look at each other with suspicion.
Hero Reports is not just a Web site. The project, which she began at the Media Lab's Center for Future Civic Media, also uses an open-source mapping platform, which allows for greater customization. Most of all, it shows how technology can change social engagement and political decisions. Which is exactly what Wright wants.
She's introduced just around the 40-minute mark, and be sure to listen soon, as the Beeb only leaves World Service recordings posted free online for a week.
CMS/NML's McWilliams writing for The Guardian (UK)
Jenna McWilliams, education researcher and curriculum specialist at Project New Media Literacies, recently picked up a new side-gig: columnist for The Guardian online.
Her first two posts are up now--the first on the film State of Play and its ignorance of how journalism works in the digital era--and the other, published yesterday, questions Rupert Murdoch's recent proclamation that news online will inevitably revert to a pay-per-view model. A taste:
The technology guru Clay Shirky writes that "It's not a revolution if nobody loses," and the first losers in this particular revolution were broadcast media outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines) and cultural elites whose social status relied on the ability to control who had access to the news, what stories they had access to, and what they did with that information.
If Murdoch is right that "the current days of the internet will soon be over," it will only be because a small handful of corporations own the vast majority of media outlets. My sense, though, is that he's wrong: That even if newspapers return to a pay-for-view model, the people will rise up against and then roll right over it by making the same content available for free elsewhere online and developing new uses for social media that subvert the efforts of Murdoch and others.
So keep an eye on Jenna's Guardian pieces. And be sure to comment quickly--the Guardian is running its own experiment by allowing comments only for the first two days after publication.
"I am a first-generation 'Star Trek' fan, and I've long argued that many of my deepest political convictions emerged from my experience of watching the program as a young man growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights era," declares Henry Jenkins, co-director of the MIT comparative media studies program and author of "Convergence Culture." "In many ways, my commitment to social justice was shaped in reality by Martin Luther King and in fantasy by 'Star Trek.'"
Obama, Jenkins points out, positioned himself in the primaries as a man "at home with both blacks and whites, someone whose mixed racial background has forced him to become a cultural translator." In this sense Obama even surpasses Spock, whose struggle to reconcile his half-human, half-Vulcan genes is a continual source of inner conflict. [. . .]
"The Vulcan side of Obama, the core of his character, and his character, hasn't changed [since the election]," Jenkins believes. "He's tough, he's cool and he's rational." His appeal stems from the self-aware integration of all aspects of his personality: black and white, wonk and poet, athlete and aesthete.
From the archives, Henry Jenkins on digital culture and violence
Via @henryjenkins comes this video featured in an MIT course "Media, Education and the Marketplace" just after the Columbine shootings:
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:00 AM in |Permalink
May 4, 2009
Podcast: "The Discipline of Political Messages in an Unruly Era"
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians' virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship - on statecraft and stagecraft - lie at the core of democracy today. Tucker Eskew explores the permanent campaign of the last ten years. What is "message discipline" in an era of atomized opinion leadership - a necessity or a fool's errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era's favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is "Fire!" being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo's "new ways", he welcomed dialogue on all.
Five MIT students have received a 2009 Anthony Sun Fellowship Award to pursue international internships this summer through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI).
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science senior Scot Frank will continue his pioneering work on a low-cost solar cooker in western China. Physics senior Charles Agoos will work with a China Educational Technology Initiative (CETI) team to help expand OpenCourseWare programs in Taiwan and Fuzhou, China.
A sophomore in architecture, Katelyn Snyder, will work on historical preservation in the Old City of Acre (Akko), Israel.
Chris Moses, a brain and cognitive sciences junior and president of STeLA, the Science and Technology Leadership Association, will join a research team at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan.
A graduate student in comparative media studies, Madeline Clare Elish, will explore the intersection of art, science and technology at the Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain.
MISTI Director Suzanne Berger, the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, presented the awards on April 29 at an annual gala honoring the more than 360 MIT students who will intern in nine countries this year through MISTI.
Berger also acknowledged the European Club for its contribution to MISTI internships in Europe, and she thanked Josep Maria Cervera of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce for its founding sponsorship of the MIT-Spain Program.
MIT Energy Initiative Director Ernest Moniz, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, discussed the importance of international experience and the global response to climate change in his keynote address.
