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CMS News Archives
 CMS alum and Convergence Culture Consortium researcher Sam Ford this week worked as a guest blogger at Fast Company, writing about spreadable media as well as his favorite topic, pro wrestling:
If we buy into the fact that corporate America needs to understand popular culture to really be able to relate to its audiences and communicate effectively--Grant McCracken's idea of the "chief culture officer" that I wrote about last week--then what better place to start than pro wrestling? It's very existence feels like an anomaly, with fans loading arenas by the thousands and gathering around television sets by the millions to watch (primarily) men performing the illusion of one-on-one sporting competition, while most fans know that what they are watching is for show.
[...]
I've found wrestling often acts as a carnival mirror to our culture, stretching and magnifying the underlying fears, prejudices and tension points amongst us. However, I think wrestling provides all sorts of learning that corporate America should pay attention to as well.
Sam Ford's posts for Fast Company:
Day 2 of Futures of Entertainment 4 is now sold out.
That leave just a handful of tickets available for Day 1. If you're still (inexplicably!) on the fence about attending a conference whose first day alone will feature Wired's Frank Rose, the head of the BBC's Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, NYU's Stephen Duncombe, and our old friend Henry Jenkins, register for Day 1 today!
Futures of Entertainment 4
November 20 and 21 (Friday and Saturday)
Today's New York Times Thursday Styles section features an article on FarmVille, Facebook's most popular game made up of players tending their virtual farms. Does its popularity signal a wish for quieter times? "Some academics," by which the Times means Philip Tan of the Gambit Game Lab, think so:
Some academics have gone so far as to suggest that their collective popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.
"The whole concept of 'I'm sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,' there is something very therapeutic about that," said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.
Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than FarmVille (perhaps just one reason that FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1). Yet some of the game's biggest fans are farmers.
"I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming," said Donna Schoonover, of Schoonover Farm in Skagit County, Wash., who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits (real ones!). "This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place."
To Harvest Squash, Click Here -- New York Times
 MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) is seeking a talented web application developer with experience working for educational audiences or developing games.
The STEP lab does research and development of new technologies for education, primarily educational games and simulations. Currently, the lab is developing the next generation of mobile educational games, called Ubiquitous Games. These games can be played on any computer with an AJAX compliant web browser, but are designed to be played on mobile devices with webkit browsers (i.e. Android, iPhone, etc). Currently, there is one prototype game built on the UbiqGames platform, and development is slated to begin shortly on four more games.
STEP is seeking a web application developer capable of working within the very general structure defined by the prototype game to develop the four new games. The games will likely be built on an existing Ruby on Rails framework. The programmer will work on a close-knit team with game designers and a project manager. This person will have the opportunity to, and should be excited to make substantial contribution to the overall design of the project/games. If you want only to take perfectly detailed specs and translate them to code, this job is not the right fit.
Required Experience/Characteristics Include:
- coding database driven web applications
- data modeling and implementation, preferably in MySQL
- Object Oriented programming of some flavor
- user interface design
- excitement about educating students, particularly in science
- experience with either educational product development or game development
- strong record on collaborative projects
Additional Desired Experience/Characteristics Include:
- Ruby on Rails development
- development of the system architecture for web applications
- good sense of humor
- enthusiasm for innovative projects at the intersection of games, learning, and technology
The position is full time for 1.5 years. Salary $50-60K/year depending on experience.
Interested candidates should submit letter and resume to tep-jobs@mit.edu with "UbiqBio Programmer" in the subject line.
Today on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog, Alex Leavitt moves past the Google Wave hype to examine how it might actually fare, based on lessons learned from other recent innovations like YouTube.
Like YouTube, Google Wave is a platform (instead of video, based around collaborative communication) that is beginning to aggregate a community. But I have a question: Will Google Wave crush the innovative potential of its users?
"Google Wave: Innovating Innovation at the Expense of Innovation" -- Convergence Culture Consortium blog
Sam Ford is a CMS grad, a CMS researcher, and a director of the communications company Peppercom. He's also now a blogger at Fast Company.
In his first post, Ford writes about convergence culture's reasonable obsession: breaking down walls between media.
My movement from an academic working with industry to an academic within the industry was driven by my interest in how companies and their audiences converse; what better place to study that conversation than public relations? In my position today at Peppercom, I remain especially interested in why and how the industry and the academy should collaborate around media and the humanities. My posts here at Fast Company this week will focus on this theme: what can the industry learn from the academy, and vice versa?
"Breaking Down Advertising's Walls" -- Fast Company
Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We'll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix's ability to effect actual change.
Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.
Download Here!
Continue reading "Podcast: "Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture"" »
 An article in the Boston Globe offered the latest defense of video games as a great brain developer, quoting The Education Arcade's Eric Klopfer (shown at right):
"Video games are hard,'' said Eric Klopfer, the director of MIT's Education Arcade, which studies and develops educational video games. "People don't like to play easy games, and games have figured out a way to encourage players to persist at solving challenging problems.''
The games aren't just hard--they're adaptively hard. They tend to challenge people right at the edge of their abilities; as players get better and score more points, they move up to more demanding levels of play. This adaptive challenge is "stunningly powerful'' for learning...
The article also cites a recent paper out of UC-Irvine which showed that three months of playing Tetris made teenage girls' brains more efficient. "Parts of the cortex, the outer layer of their brains responsible for high-level functions, actually got thicker."
However, no one knows for sure if that kind of improvement leads to long-term, generalized smarts. "Until now, people have been asking can you learn anything from games?'' the Globe quotes Klopfer as saying. "That's a less interesting question than what aspects of games are important for fostering learning.''
How video games are good for the brain -- Boston Globe
Advertising shops are scouring for creative technologists: a rare breed familiar with technology and conversant with new forms of media, but also able to translate that know-how into compelling digital-branding vehicles.
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Look beyond portfolio schools to the growing group of programs that incubate tech-minded talent. Favorites include the Rochester Institute of Technology, the aforementioned Hyper Island, a Swedish digital-ad school, MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and New York University's interactive telecommunications program. Also expected to be a breeding ground for new digital talent is Boulder Digital Works, a new stateside graduate program featuring mini-courses from Hyper Island.
Advertising Age: Where to Find Tech-Focused Advertising Talent
The election of an African-American president in November 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama's ascension transformed anything? Many people's answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media's coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?
Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News discussed these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. This forum is the first of two this term in our ongoing civic media series, a collaboration of the Communications Forum and the Media Lab's Center for Future Civic Media.
Download Here!
Continue reading "Podcast: "Communications Forum: Race, Politics, and American Media"" »
This year's conference is November 20 and 21 here at MIT:
Convergence has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 4 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.
Confirmed speakers include Frank Rose of Wired, Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance, Stephen Duncombe author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy, and many more.
Register today! http://futuresofentertainment.org/registration/
 From the GAMBIT blog:
Please enjoy this "behind the scenes" content from the development process of our summer prototypes. For eight weeks teams of students worked together to develop these games from scratch with only some research guidelines as a starting point. We hope that by exposing our process to the public we can encourage innovation in game development and game studies for industry and academia alike. Take a look at the developer interviews, concept art, sound, design documentation, essays, commentaries, and all other content we will make available in this series. But most importantly please take a chance to go play the games. We have made them, for you.
 Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT. This was a talk about camouflage framed by the question of "how not to be seen"--in film, on film, as film. In the first part, Shell introduced "how not to be seen" in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. In the second part, Shell screened and discussed her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Blind as in blindness, and blind as in that actively constructed structure intended for the concealment of a hunter from her game. Shell's book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance will be published by Zone Books.
Download Here!
Continue reading "Podcast: "How Not to Be Seen"" »
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