CMS News Archives

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In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan's major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. In this talk, Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine, discusses how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan's identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as "geek"--an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. How did this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture create its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media? By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, Prof. Ito will provide fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.

Continue reading "Video: Mimi Ito, "Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 2:48 PM in , , Podcast, | Permalink

Marina Bers

This talk focuses on digital spaces to support positive youth development.

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As the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns, there is a sense of urgency for developing strategies and educational programs that promote positive development by taking into consideration the children's social, emotional, cognitive, physical, civic and spiritual needs. But we should also consider the unique design features of each technology and the practices and policies that shape different interactions in the digital landscape. Although this talk will focus on new technologies, it is inspired by an old question: "How should we live?" This talk will present an approach to help children gain the technological literacies of the 21st century while developing a sense of identity, values and purpose. Too often youth's experiences with technology are framed in negative terms. This talk acknowledges problems and risks, and takes an interventionist perspective. Based on over a decade and a half of research, this talk provides a theoretical framework for guiding the implementation of experiences that take advantage of new technologies to support learning and personal development, as well as examples from concrete experiences. These engage children in playful learning by supporting digital content creation, creativity, choices of conduct, communication, collaboration and community building. These are the six C's proposed by the Positive Technological Development framework. They can guide the design and the evaluation of digital experiences from early childhood to adolescence, and offer a possible path to help children out of the playpens into the playgrounds of this technological era.

Marina Umaschi Bers, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote positive youth development. Dr. Bers received prestigious awards such as the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a five year National Science Foundation Young Investigator's Career Award and the American Educational Research Association's Jan Hawkins Award. Over the past decade and a half, Dr. Bers has conceived, designed and evaluated diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds in after-school programs, museums, hospitals, and schools both in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Bers has received several NSF grants and is active in publishing her research in academic journals. Her book Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom was published in 2008 by Teacher's College Press. Most recently, Dr. Bers wrote The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: Out of the playpen into the playground, to be published by Oxford University in early 2012. Dr. Bers is from Argentina. In 1994 she came to the U.S. and received a Master's degree in Educational Media from Boston University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory.

Continue reading "Podcast: "Out of the Playpen into the Playground: The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:36 PM in , Events, Podcast | Permalink

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Drawing on recent U.S. television series "The Unit" and "Sleeper Cells," Cynthia Young examines recent shifts in media representations of African American men, arguing that in the context of the "war on terror," the image of the criminal and anti-social young black male has mutated into the image of the black patriot, at war against a new enemy of the nation, the Muslim terrorist. Exploring the figure of the black soldier, her work asks the questions: What kind of popular culture is made in the context of war? How do notions of civil rights shift in a post-Civil Rights era? And when and how are such notions mobilized in service to violent and racist conceptions of Iraqis, Arabs, and other Muslims? In his commentary, Visiting Scholar Anamik Saha will draw upon his research on popular cultural representations of South Asians and Muslims in Britain during the same period.

Cynthia Young is an Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches courses on literature and popular culture. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her book on U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. She is currently working on a project that considers race, specifically blackness, after the September 11 attacks. Interrogating popular culture and political organizing sites, this project considers how the Civil Rights legacy has been hijacked by Conservatives supporting an anti-immigrant, pro-war and often white supremacist agenda.

Continue reading "Podcast: Race and Representation after 9/11" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 5:07 PM in , Events, Podcast | Permalink

There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are "born" in the new medium, as opposed to those that have "migrated" to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with "virtual methods" that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-á-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, he will propose propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. Rogers will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, he proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term "online groundedness." The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods.

Prof. Dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair and is full University Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His forthcoming book, Digital Methods, is also with MIT Press.

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Continue reading "Podcast: Richard Rogers, "The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 12:24 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

John Ellis

Digital filming has transformed documentary, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers have been able to work more informally with their subjects, giving rise to the fusion format of reality TV as well as changing the nature of documentaries themselves. From the audience perspective, affordable digital platforms mean that almost everyone knows what it is like to film and be filmed. The result is a transformation of the documentary genre, where films are now seen as documents of interactions rather than expositions of fact. Ellis explores this new phase in documentary, using methods derived from Goffman as well as an intimate understanding of the technologies of filming.

John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, and this semester's visiting scholar at the Annenberg Institute, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000) and TV FAQ (2007) and the co-author of Language and Materialism (1977). His Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation will appear in 2012, and is based in part on his 19 years as an independent producer for British TV, making documentaries about cinema and the arts, the politics of media, and the food industry. He served on the editorial board of Screen magazine (1975-1985), was the vice-chair of the film producers' association PACT (1988-1994), and now chairs the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).

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Continue reading "Podcast: "How Documentary Went Digital: the Implications of Informal Filming and Skeptical Audiences"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 2:24 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Clara Fernández-Vara

What do Shakespeare and videogames have in common? Clara Fernández-Vara, a Comparative Media Studies alumna, explains her journey from researching Shakespeare in performance to studying and developing videogames. Applying concepts from theatre in performance illuminates the relationship between the player and the game, as well as between game and narrative.

Videogames are not theatre, but the comparison gives way to productive questions: What is the dramatic text of the game? How does this text shape the actions of the player? Who are the performers? Who is the audience? These questions will be addressed in the context of adventure games, a story-driven genre where the player solves puzzles that are integrated in the fictional world of the game.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where she teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing, as well as develop games with teams of students. Clara is a graduate from the Comparative Media Studies program, and holds a PhD in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research concentrates on adventure games, game playing as a performance activity, and the integration of stories in simulated environments. She has released two experimental adventure games, Rosemary (2009) and Symon (2010).

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Continue reading "Podcast: "From Elsinore to Monkey Island: Theatre and Videogames as Performance Activities"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:47 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

This lecture examines the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009, in which a group of contemporary New York artists were invited to photograph Amsterdam to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of Manhattan.

Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the selected artists sought to produce work capable of defamiliarizing established images of Amsterdam. The claim of the exhibition was that seeing Amsterdam through the lens of New York photographers enabled new and surprising perspectives on four key aspects of the city: the street, the night, the water, and the outskirts. Interrogating this claim, the lecture will analyze individual artworks, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibition, and -- most importantly -- the role that transnational exchange can play in both resisting and reinforcing dominant, globalized images of contemporary city spaces.

Christoph Lindner is Professor of Literature and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of London Institute in Paris. His recent books include Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities (2010), Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture (2003).

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Continue reading "Podcast: Christoph Lindner, "Amsterdam and New York: Transnational Photographic Exchange in the Era of Globalization" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 1:32 PM in , Events, Podcast | Permalink

Rosalind Williams is a historian who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology. She has taught at MIT since 1982 and currently serves as the Dibner Professor for the History of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has also served as head of the STS Program and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs at the Institute, as well as president of the Society for the History of Technology. She has written three books as well as essays and articles about the emergence of a predominantly human-built world and its implications for human life. Her forthcoming book extends this theme to examine consciousness of the condition of "human empire" as expressed in the writings of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late 19th century.

About this Communications Forum
Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.

However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don't cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.

With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?

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Continue reading "Video: Rosalind Williams: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:35 AM in , , Events, Podcast, | Permalink

Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter for ProPublica -- his recent work has focused on oil and gas industry practices. He is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

About this Communications Forum
Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.

However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don't cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.

With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?

Download!

Continue reading "Video: Abrahm Lustgarten: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:40 AM in , , Events, Podcast, | Permalink

Andrea Pitzer is editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that looks at how storytelling works in every medium. Storyboard's mission is to feature the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting.

About this Communications Forum
Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.

However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don't cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.

With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?

Download!

Continue reading "Video: Andrea Pitzer: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:31 PM in , , Events, Podcast | Permalink

Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.

However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don't cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.

With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?

Andrea Pitzer is editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that looks at how storytelling works in every medium. Storyboard's mission is to feature the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting.

Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter for ProPublica -- his recent work has focused on oil and gas industry practices. He is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rosalind Williams is a historian who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology. She has taught at MIT since 1982 and currently serves as the Dibner Professor for the History of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has also served as head of the STS Program and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs at the Institute, as well as president of the Society for the History of Technology. She has written three books as well as essays and articles about the emergence of a predominantly human-built world and its implications for human life. Her forthcoming book extends this theme to examine consciousness of the condition of "human empire" as expressed in the writings of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late 19th century.

Moderated by Tom Levenson, who is Head and of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies as well as Director of its graduate program. Professor Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, The Sciences, and he is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.

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Continue reading "Video: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 2:07 PM in , Events, Podcast, | Permalink

Trace Beaulieu and Mary Jo Pehl

In December of 2007, Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu, two of the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000, assembled many of the original members of that cult TV phenomenon to form Cinematic Titanic, a live and DVD version based on their original formula of riffing on terrible movies. The actors essentially play themselves as they participate in an experiment for some unknown, possibly shadowy corporation or military force. The story currently provided to the cast is that there is a tear in the "electron scaffolding" that threatens all digital media in the world. Their experience doing MST3K is key to the organization's plans. Two of the cast, Trace Beaulieu and Mary Jo Pehl, discussed their thoughts on producing Cinematic Titanic which came to Boston on October 29th at the Wilbur Theater.

They spoke with Generoso Fierro and Jason Begy, both of CMS's GAMBIT Game Lab.

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Continue reading "Video: MST3K and Cinematic Titanic" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:35 AM in , Events, Podcast, | Permalink

There are a growing number of games that are location-based. They use mobile devices and locative technologies to turn physical space into a game board. Games like Foursquare get people moving from place to place, exploring the world around them and potentially meeting people nearby. But while many games use location as the context for interaction, few use location as the content for interaction. Local Engagement Games (LEGs) are location-based games designed for the specificity of a location, with the intention of integrating into local cultures and local institutions. They reinforce existing geographical communities because the rules of the game are couched within existing rules of civic participation. Whether it's a game built around a town hall meeting or a government planning process, LEGs scaffold local processes to foster community and commitment to civic life.

In this talk, Gordon discusses two LEGs developed at the Engagement Game Lab. Participatory Chinatown is a 3-D role-playing game designed to be integrated into the master planning process of Boston's Chinatown. And CommunityPlanIt, a location-based mobile game platform (in development), is designed to engage neighborhoods in official planning processes, while forging geographically-based communities and advocacy groups around local issues.

Eric Gordon is an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College and director of the new Engagement Game Lab. He is the author of The Urban Spectator: American Concept-cities from Kodak to Google (Dartmouth, 2010) and the co-author of the forthcoming book tentatively titled, Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell, 2011).

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Intro music: "Legs", Pickin' on ZZ Top: A Bluegrass Tribute

Continue reading "Podcast: Eric Gordon, "She's Got LEGs and She Knows How To Use Them: How Neighborhoods Can Use Local Engagement Games to Build Community and Plan for the Future"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:39 AM in , Events, Podcast | Permalink

Ethan Gilsdorf discussed some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds--from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such "escapist" adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?

Gilsdorf talked about the culture's discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and looked at society's ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author's own past misgivings and final acceptance of his "geek" identity.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks"" »

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

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.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Anecdotes from a Lifetime of Electronic Product Creation"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 11:38 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

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.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "The Discipline of Political Messages in an Unruly Era"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:53 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series -- a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Mr. Claremont addressed thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules. Questions and answers followed.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Opening Doors, Building Worlds": The Origins of the X-Men" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 9:41 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of
intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as World of Warcraft (WOW) this event was held in conjunction with the exhibition SHADA/JAHN/VAUCELLE, "Hollowed," which includes the WOW Pod, a collaborative project by Cati Vaucelle & Shada/Jahn. Panelists included Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Postdoctoral Associate at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; Raimundas Malasauskas, Curator, Artists Space (NYC); Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program; Marisa Jahn, Artist in Residence, MIT Media Lab; Steve Shada, artist collaborator; Cati Vaucelle, PhD candidate Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; and Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "On the WOW Pod: A Design for Extimacy and Fantasy-Fulfillment for the World of Warcraft Addict"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 12:06 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?

Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:57 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology University of Michigan

In humans, gender--femininity, masculinity--is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Robertson explored and interrogated the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She showed that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a "posthuman sexism," and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 4:13 PM in , Podcast | 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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Continue reading "Podcast: "Telling Stories In Print, Online and Onscreen: Walden Media and Family Audiences"" »

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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Continue reading "Podcast: "Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online Games & Virtual Worlds"" »

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

Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become ever more common, distinct national cinemas are being replaced by a variety of transnational cinemas. Anime, often considered a uniquely Japanese cinematic form, is no exception. This talk will explore one recent example of transnational anime: Tekkon Kinkreet, the first Japanese anime to be written and directed by Americans. Christina Klein is associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 and is currently writing a book about the globalization of U.S. and Asian film industries.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Transnational, U.S.-Asian Cinema: The Case of Tekkon Kinkreet (2006)" with Christina Klein" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 1:12 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment. As head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at Santa Cruz, he is involved in such projects as automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Mateas is a collaborator on the interactive drama Facade (see interactivestory.net).

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Continue reading "Podcast: "The Authoring Challenge for Interactive Storytelling"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:40 PM in , Podcast | 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

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

Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.

Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Comics and Social Conflict" with Ho Che Anderson, Jeet Heer and Diana Tamblyn" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:50 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

With respondent Diana Henderson, Greenblatt speaks on the transformation of literary study in America and his own career as a teacher and writer.

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Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:24 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses -- scientific, everyday, and anthropological -- of embodied sonic presence. Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of "life" as an analytical category for contemporary biology.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology"" »

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 12:08 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally include puppets, masks, icons, and other "things", the more recent innovations of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring he will be directing a "Living Newspaper"-style production about the politics of global healthcare with MIT students. His latest book, American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examines particular moments of puppet, mask, and object theater in the United States over the past 150 years. He is a trombonist with the Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and organizer of the upcoming October 12th HONK! Festival Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 10:53 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson will present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (Simon & Schuster, 2008), including the complex ways in which video games may benefit or disadvantage children. They will also talk about myths and politics in media violence research, and how they influence the views of academics and mass media. Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D. are cofounders and co-directors (with Eugene Beresin, M.D.) of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. They are both on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. Kutner received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and trained at the Mayo Clinic. He's a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He wrote the "Parent & Child" column for the New York Times as well as five books on child development. Olson was principal investigator for a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers, which formed the basis for Grand Theft Childhood. She has a Doctor of Science degree in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral certificate in pharmaceutical medicine from the University of Basel.

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A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbean, and the failure of realism as a narrative strategy to describe the deep history of the New World. Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. He is the author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 5:04 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Los Angeles artist and special effects virtuoso Pat O'Neill filmed The Decay of Fiction (2002) in the landmark Ambassador Hotel, once the center of Hollywood celebrity culture. His film blurs the boundaries between architectural investigation, urban documentation, and aesthetic exploration. At once a poetic homage to classical film genres, it is also a suggestive indication of how remembering the city is changing in response to new technologies. Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994), and currently serves as Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 6:00 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

In the year 2008, artists and businesspersons navigate the vast divide between the world of independent filmmaking and the Hollywood studio system as the lines between the two become increasingly more blurred. As pop culture integration - the fusing of music, sports, dance, event programming, reality, and other subcultures geared toward mainstream audiences while highlighting the genre demographic - has become the lifeline for both the artistic and commercial filmmaker, where do you find the happy medium, or is there one anymore? Writer, producer, distributor, and president of Tri Destined Films, Gregory Anderson has been called a part of the "new" Oscar Micheaux movement as a trailblazer for independent film distribution. Gregory created Stomp the Yard, one of the most profitable dance films of all time, and produced, marketed, and theatrically distributed the independent film Trois, one of the Top 50 highest grossing Independent Films of its release year according to Daily Variety.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "The Show Business High Wire Act: Walking the Tightrope Between Studio Filmmaking and Independent Production"" »

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 6:00 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either "anonymous" or "five names" depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "Slightly More Than Expected from a Band of Novelists: On How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian (nay, European) Literature and Popular Culture (and then Came to Boston to Brag About It)"" »

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 2:54 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Denis Dyack is the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Dyack is a noted authority on interactive software development and offers valuable insight into the process of designing next-generation games that appeal to the masses. Under Dyack's direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Dyack (B. Phed, H. B.Sc, M. Sc.) founded Silicon Knights in 1992 after publishing Cyber Empires in 1991. Since that time, Silicon Knights has moved from creating PC games to premiere AAA console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original PlayStation. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create another critically acclaimed game, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Dyack and his team are currently working with Microsoft on the Too Human trilogy for the Xbox 360, and developing an exciting new game for Sega of America.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 7:20 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Non-traditional and viral marketing campaigns raise questions about the content status of advertising and the authenticity of commercial art. This panel discussion will consider the challenges of engaging audiences in non-conventional ways, looking at the status of viral media and the nature of non-traditional marketing campaigns. Berkman Center Fellow and C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf will moderate the converation with Natalie Lent from Fanscape and Mike Rubenstein of The Barbarian Group.

Co-sponsored by the Convergence Culture Consortium

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Media strategist and author of Fundamentals of Television Branding and Marketing Lee Hunt presents recent innovations in television branding and discusses some of the struggles being faced by networks in the era of convergence and transmedia.

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Posted by Xiaochang Li at 5:34 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Author and management advisor B. Joseph Pine II discusses how ideas outlined in his book The Experience Economy fit within the context of digital technologies, virtual worlds, and convergence culture.

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Posted by Xiaochang Li at 8:55 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Andrew Slack, founder of The HP Alliance, an organization seeking to engage Harry Potter fans in social and political activism, discusses the origins and motivations behind the group and their current project to raise awareness about the genocide in Darfur.

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Continue reading "Podcast: "The Harry Potter Alliance: How the Myth of Harry Potter Is Changing the World"" »

Posted by Xiaochang Li at 8:38 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

This presentation concerns how the Harry Potter Alliance, an educational and activist organization, is employing allegories from the Harry Potter series to mobilize tens of thousands of young Harry Potter fans toward fighting the "Dark Arts" in the real world like racism, homophobia, global warming, and the genocide in Darfur.

Andrew Slack is the founder and executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance where he works on innovative ways to mobilize tens of thousands of Harry Potter fans through a vibrant online community. Andrew has also co-written, acted in, and produced online videos that have been viewed more than 3 million times. He has trained at an acting conservatory in London and studied under peace and civil rights activists across both Northern Ireland and the US. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University, Andrew is dedicated to learning and extrapolating how modern myth and new media can transform our lives both personally and collectively.

The emerging Experience Economy - which is supplanting the Service Economy just as it supplanted the Industrial Economy and the Agrarian Economy before that - opens up entire new vistas for engaging customers. While people will always be open to innovative real-life experiences, B. Joseph Pine II explores how perhaps the greatest opportunities lie in thinking about how to use digital technology and all experience media to stage compelling experiences, whether they enhance what's going in the real world, effectively replace that within a virtual world, or create permeable boundaries between the two and, indeed, between all experience media.

B. Joseph Pine II is an author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike. He is co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. With James H. Gilmore, Pine has written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (1999), Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value Through Mass Customization (2000), and Authenticity: What Customers Really Want (2007).

In Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam wrote about a generation of Americans cut off from traditional forms of community life and civic engagement, passive consumers of mass media. But others have noted the expansion of participatory cultures and virtual communities on the web, the growth of blogs, podcasts, and other forms of citizen journalism, the rise of new kinds of social affiliations within virtual worlds. What lessons can we learn from these online worlds that will make an impact in the communities where we work, sleep, and vote? What new technologies and practices offer us the best chance of revitalizing civic engagement? This forum marks the launch of the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program and is the first in a series of events designed to focus attention on the relationship between emerging media and civic engagement. The center has been funded by a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation. Its directors will be Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitchel Resnick of the Media Lab and Henry Jenkins of CMS.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is Muriel R. Cooper Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory where he directs the Computing Culture group.

Henry Jenkins is co-director of Comparative Media Studies and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities at MIT. He is the author of several books on various aspects of media and popular culture including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Beth Noveck is professor of law at New York Law School where she directs the Institute for Information Law & Policy. She is the founder and organizer of the State of Play conferences, an annual event on virtual worlds research.

Ethan Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, and co-founder of Global Voices. He is a founder of Geekcorps and is currently working on Global Attention Profiles, which gives graphical portraits of where different media sources are focusing their attention.

Promax/BDA, the association of television promotion and marketing professionals, holds an annual international conference bringing together media marketers from around the world. One of the keynote attractions is Lee Hunt's "New Best Practices," an annual overview of ground-breaking strategies, innovative tactics, and breakthrough creative. In this excerpt from his 2007 presentation, Lee explores the challenges and opportunities faced by his television marketing peers, and analyzes solutions that have reshaped the industry.

Lee Hunt works as a strategist and trainer for media companies around the world. Considered one of the industry's leading experts in television advertising and promotion, Lee began his career on the client side, launching and branding Lifetime, VH1 and TNT. In the 90's he founded one of TV's most successful creative services companies, Lee Hunt Associates, working with more than 100 different television networks around the world. Today, Lee works as a consultant developing brand strategy for new and established networks, continues to pioneer a new marketing discipline - break architecture and audience management, and conducts training workshops for television networks across the globe. He is the author of Fundamentals of Television Advertising & Promotion and Break|Throughs, the quarterly anthology of innovative advertising and promotion.

A conversation about the theory and practice of collective intelligence, with emphasis on Wikipedia, other instances of aggregated intellectual work and on recent innovative applications in product development for both large and small businesses. Thomas Malone, founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, will anchor the discussion.

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the book The Future of Work. Malone has published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters and is an inventor with 11 patents.

Restricted to CMS faculty and students. What is the state of the CMS program as a whole? Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we headed? CMS co-director Henry Jenkins will lead the department's semiannual Town Meeting.

Katie Salen's Game School project is a platform for considering how game design theory and the practice of gaming can be used as foundational strategies for the design of learning environments that support the ongoing formation of learner identities. This colloquium will explore the design issues Salen's team has faced while designing the school, as well as the range of constraints guiding the project.

Salen is the Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play, as well as an Associate Professor in the Design and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design. She is co-author of two books: Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals and The Game Design Reader, as well as the forthcoming volume The Ecology of Games, for which she served as editor. Katie worked as an animator on Richard Linklater's critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life and recently co-developed Karaoke Ice, an ice-cream truck turned mobile karaoke unit deployed to collect and curate idiosyncratic performances of tinkle-pop songs. She designs big games, slow games, and game-like experiences for audiences of all types and is currently working on a multiplayer online game to teach kids game design thinking.

With digital convergence, the historical specificity of early video art is disappearing. How is that history being written? And what are its stakes?

Caroline A. Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Professor of art history in the History, Theory, Criticism Program in the Department of Architecture at MIT, she has also worked as an essayist and curatorial consultant, most recently with MIT's List Visual Art Center. She completed her PhD at Stanford University in 1992, before which she held positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85). Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at MoMA and Harvard as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, and the Hara Museum Tokyo, among other venues; her publications include Sensorium (as editor, 2006), Eyesight Alone (2005), Machine in the Studio (1996/98), the co-edited volume Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998), and many other works. A frequent contributor to Artforum, Jones's current research into globalism informs her next book on contemporary art, the world picture, and "biennial culture."

Co-sponsored by the List Visual Arts Center

A generation of scholars, critics and political leaders has denounced videogames as a best a distraction and at worst a negative influence on society. Yet for a significant and growing minority of activists and researchers, games may also represent a resource for engaging young people with the political process and heightening their awareness of social issues. In what ways do young people use the online societies constructed in multiplayer games to rehearse and refine skills of citizenship? Can we imagine games as medium that encourages public awareness and citizenship? And what might it mean to empower young people to create their own games to reflect their perceptions of the world around them? This is the second in a continuing series from the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Mario Armstrong is a technology correspondent for National Public Radio (for Morning Edition and News and Notes) and hosts talk shows about technology and culture on XM radio and public radio stations WYPR and WEAA in the Baltimore area. Armstrong is one of the founders and organizers of the Urban Video Game Academy, which conducts workshops in Atlanta and Baltimore to help minority youth learn game design skills.

Ian Bogost is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech and co-founder of Persuasive Games. He is the author of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesman are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamesters, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this Forum, producers from the NBC series Heroes will discuss their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value producers play on the most active segments of their audiences.

Jesse Alexander is an Executive Producer for Heroes. His previous production credits have included Alias and Lost.

Mark Warshaw is a writer/producer/director who, in 2006, founded FlatWorld Intertainment, Inc. to produce original interactive content and consult with entertainment companies and artists on alternative media. He was the original web producer for Smallville and is now the person responsible for overseeing the web extensions of Heroes.

Leon Trilling received his B.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (Mechanical Engineering, 1944 and Aeronautics, 1948). He taught at the California Institute of Technology and was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris before coming to MIT in 1951. He joined the MIT STS faculty in 1978. He founded the Integrated Studies Program at MIT and co-directed the New Liberal Arts Program. He is a senior staff member of The Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT) at MIT. His research centers on the development of jet propelled airliners and the role of science and mathematics curriculum in the middle school.

Michael Stiefel is principal of Reliable Software, Inc., a Massachusetts company that specializes in consulting and training with Microsoft technologies. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering, an M.S. in nuclear engineering, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, political science, and the history of technology, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wesley L. Harris is Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics where he is the Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics. Harris is a former NASA associate administrator for aeronautics responsible for all aeronautics programs, facilities, and personnel (1993-1995).

Co-sponsored by the Program in Science, Technology and Society

An illustrated talk/dialogue in which Cayley will attempt to explain and justify the title his presentation has been given; to explain, that is, what he thought he was doing when he strung it together as a 'literal collage' and what he thinks he's doing now. Today there is a recognized practice of writing in networked and programmable media. A number of literary artists are 'writing digital media', and their work is being studied and taught. Cayley's presentation, using - chiefly - descriptions and illustrations of his own work, attempts to highlight certain 'properties and methods' of this emergent, fast-developing writing practice and its relation to aspects of critical theory that haunt or drive the work.

John Cayley has practiced as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer, and all these activities have often intersected with his training in Chinese culture and language. Links to his writing in networked and programmable media are at www.shadoof.net/in/. His last printed book of poems, adaptations and translations was Ink Bamboo (London: Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry 2001 (www.eliterature.org). He has taught and worked at a number of universities in the United Kingdom, and was an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London. In the United States, he has taught or directed research at the University of California San Diego and Brown University, where, arriving in the Fall of 2007, he is now appointed as a five-year Visiting Professor of Literary Arts with a brief to teach and develop writing in digital media. His most recent work explores ambient poetics in programmable media and writing in immersive VR, with parallel theoretical interventions concerning the role of code and the temporal properties of textuality.

Posted by Geoffrey Long at 9:11 AM in | Permalink

Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.

NOTE: This was the first of two colloquia about American professional wrestling organized this term by Sam Ford ’07. Ford taught a spring class on the pro wrestling industry and is a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He is a weekly columnist for the Ohio County Times-News in Hartford, Ky., and performs in pro wrestling events on occasion.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 2:38 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Longtime soap opera writer Kay Alden talks about her decades in the industry with CMS graduate student Sam Ford ’07 who is writing his thesis about soap operas. Alden worked for more than 30 years on The Young and the Restless, the top-rated daytime drama that she served as head writer for from 1998 to 2006. Recently, she took on a consulting position with ABC Daytime and continues working with the genre during what is seen as a period of substantial change for the daytime television industry. Ford’s thesis, “"As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment",” focuses on the shifting technologies and cultural patterns that are affecting daytime television.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 4:18 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Mick Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, alked about his experiences as an entertainer and bestselling author who has written three memoirs (including Foley Is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling) two novels, and a variety of children's books. Foley has been a professional wrestler since the mid-1980s and was a headlining star for World Wrestling Entertainment (www.wwe.com) under the personas of Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love. Foley will discuss telling stories in a variety of written and performative genres and how he has managed to bridge the gap across multiple genres and entertainment forms.

This is the 2nd part of our multi-part American Pro Wrestling series.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 9:53 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 3:20 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 9:27 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

Science, Technology, and Society scholar Timothy Stoneman shared his research on missionary radio with the CMS colloquium on Nov. 2. Stoneman's recent doctoral research takes a historical look at how Christian missionaries utilized radio in developing nations to evangelize.

This proliferation of broadcasting is directly linked to a “sea change” in shifting the locus and population of Christianity from the north to the south on a global basis, Stoneman said.

Stoneman focuses his research on the period between 1931, with the first missionary broadcasts, through the 1970s when the transistor radio changed the medium dramatically. Evangelical radio relied on community receivers, often supplied by missions for free or highly subsidized. The radio functioned as a more social, group activity in developing nations because they were relatively rare. Missionaries were innovative, Stoneman finds, to put the technology to use in a way that fit with the local environments. Often radios were “pretuned” to receive only evangelical broadcasts.

While the radio cannot be solely accredited for conversion, Stoneman asks us to reframe the question from conversion to legitimization. The radio, he argues, made Christianity part of everyday life, normalized, legitimate. While this is not the same as a spontaneous conversion, over time the radio broadcasts have paved the way for a slower, more gradual acceptance and practice.

Other inherent qualities of the medium such as repetition, oral communication, and the personal association with voice all helped radio achieve the mission it was set out to do in developing nations throughout the 20th century.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 10:57 AM in | Permalink

At the heart of the Oct. 26 colloquium conversation about art and technology was the question “what is art?” In an engaging roundtable discussion, CMS Professor Beth Coleman, Rhizome Executive Director Lauren Cornell and author and curator Jon Ippolito explored this question in the context of a networked world. How does the Internet change art practice and its relationship to the curator, critic, and public?

Cornell presented the short history and evolution of Internet art from its beginnings in the mid 1990s and shared several examples of early works. Cornell points to the second wave of the Internet, Web 2.0, as the most significant change to the behavior of Net art due to the rise of viral distribution (the “bored at work network”) and community participation.

Rhizome, which functions as a community space and support system for Net artists, has set out to refine digital archiving with a shared vocabulary. For this task Rhizome turns to the participatory community and uses tagging and folksonomy to cull the most important and most popular expressive categories.

Ippolito asked the question, can networks be adapted to support new media or do they cause harm? His overall assessment was that the institution as it is does impede the possibilities of new media by producing an imbalance of archivists to “animateurs,” attorneys to activists, and academics to artists. Ippolito sees the distanced documentation, litigation and study of new media as contrary to the spirit of the art itself.

The essential tone of the evening was similar to the unease and confusion about exactly where participatory culture will take us: how do we talk about network aesthetics, and how will that change art in the immediate future?

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 10:56 AM in | Permalink

Timothy Stoneman, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT, discusses his research on missionary and evangelical radio in America from an historical perspective.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 10:43 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

Featured speakers included Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; Jon Ippolito, media artist, curator, author; and our own Beth Coleman, Assistant Professor of Comparative Media Studies and of Writing and Humanistic Studies, co-founder of the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project.

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Posted by Rik Eberhardt at 9:28 AM in , Podcast | Permalink

Scott Donaton, editorial director of the Ad Age Group, explored how digital culture's empowerment of end-users is impacting advertising and marketing.

Donaton's aptly entitled talk at the Oct. 12 CMS colloquium, "Out of Control," referenced the power shift towards a consumer-dictated market. Looking at advertising from the perspective of the ad journalist, he shared some interesting trends in the industry: 1) As ad dollars are increasingly spent in online and new media markets, properties are forced to relinquish the control over their brand and brand image; 2) thanks to remix culture, brand purity is no longer safe on the Internet; and consumers are free to express their opinions on services and products and distribute them as widely as the advertisers themselves.

During the Q&A, Donaton was asked how much it would take to actually kill a brand.

"Brand equity built up over time is a pretty powerful thing," he said. Saying it would be quite difficult to take down an established brand with a few critical commercial mashups, he pointed out that even though tobacco is known to kill people, it is still a billion dollar business. "The only real way brands kill themselves is not delivering on the promise they make to the consumer," Donaton said.

Donaton chronicled successful and not-so-successful attempts to ride this rapid and radical business change. He finds that the better campaigns are not afraid to address their consumers directly, are shifting towards premium pricing to sell "fewer products for more money," and are respectful of the consumer.

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Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine talked about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 1:31 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

By Amanda Finkelberg '07

Podcasting may not be the newest technology on the block, but it continues to generate a powerful impact on both grassroots and large-scale content production and distribution. This impact was explored during "Re-Inventing Television: Podcasting and the Future of Media," a colloquium held on Sept. 28. The speaker was Chris Boebel, MIT's manager of multimedia development for Academic Media Production Services (AMPS). A podcast of "Re-Inventing Television: Podcasting and the Future of Media" is available from the CMS Web site.

Boebel, a graduate of NYU's film program, considers himself to be more of a "content producer than a technologist." He explained that asynchronous delivery and low-production costs have created a media landscape in which almost anyone can produce podcast-quality material and distribute it easily to a wide range of subscribers. Boebel then introduced ZigZag, MIT's new video and audio podcasting service. Asking CMS graduate students to consider submitting video and audio to the site, he stressed the need for more student-generated content that represents the diverse voices of the MIT community.

A question and answer period struggled with the question of the future of television. It seems that ABC's full-length show streams and software like Apple's Front Row are rapidly changing the way we access visual media, but no one seems to be able to explain what that means for the future of the medium. Concerns centered on the abundance of information and how to navigate it, how structural changes will affect content, and the financial implications of those changes.

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Chris Boebel and David Tamés gave us an overview of the production of ZigZag, MIT's new video podcast/magazine, as well as a look into the future of media production, distribution, and consumption.

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Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics (1993) and Reinventing Comics (2001) graced us with an excellent talk about his latest book, Making Comics, as a part of his Making Comics Fifty States tour, which he is also blogging.

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Sex in Games with Brenda Brathwaite, Professor of Game Design, Savannah College of Art & Design, whose book Sex in Video Games will be published this September.

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Posted by CMS Webmaster at 4:42 PM in , Podcast | Permalink