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CMS News Archives
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon
In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future?
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson.
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Continue reading "Video, "News or Entertainment? The Press in Modern Political Campaigns"" »
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The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver will discuss his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps the most influential political blog in the world -- and the ways in which statistics are changing the face of journalism in a conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Continue reading "Podcast: "A Conversation with Nate Silver"" »
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Despite many infrastructural and economic hurdles, entertainment media industries are burgeoning in West Africa. Today, the Nigerian cinema market--"Nollywood"--is the second largest in the world in terms of the annual volume of films distributed behind only the Indian film industry. And an era of digital distribution has empowered content created in Lagos, or Accra, to spread across geographic and cultural boundaries. New commercial models for distribution as well as international diasporic networks have driven the circulation of this material. But so has rampant piracy and the unofficial online circulation of this content. What innovations are emerging from West Africa? How has Nigerian cinema in particular influenced local television and film markets in other countries across West Africa, and across the continent? What does the increasing visibility of West African popular culture mean for this region--especially as content crosses various cultural contexts, within and outside the region? And what challenges does West Africa face in continuing to develop its entertainment industries?
Derrick N. Ashong leads the band Soulfège, a group that produces an eclectic blend of hip-hop, reggae, funk, world beat and West African highlife music and has been featured in such major media as MTV Africa and NPR. Also known as DNA, which is the name of his blog, Ashong hosted Oprah Radio's The Derrick Ashong Experience and Al-Jazeera English's social media TV show The Stream.
Colin M. Maclay is the managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Both as co-founder of Harvard's International Technologies Group and at Berkman, Maclay's research pairs hands-on multi-stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveal trends, challenges and opportunities for the integration of communications technologies in developing communities.
Fadzi Makanda is a business development manager in the New York office of iROKO Partners, a distributor of African--and particularly Nollywood--entertainment. Makanda leads the development and execution of U.S. advertising sales strategies for the company.
Moderator:
Ralph Simon is founder of the Mobilium Advisory Group, which studies innovation in mobile usage in such countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. He has served as an executive at Capitol Records, Blue Note Records, and EMI Music, and he co-founded the Zomba Group with Clive Calder of South Africa. Simon earned the title "Father of the Ring Tone" when he created the first ring tone company in 1997.
Continue reading "Video, "New Media in West Africa"" »
The role of the library in the digital age is one of the compelling questions of our era. How are libraries coping with the promise and perils of our impending digital future? What urgent initiatives are underway to assure universal access to our print inheritance and to the digital communication forms of the future? How is the very idea of the library changing? These and related questions will engage our distinguished panelists, who represent both research and public libraries and two of whom serve on the steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America.
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, Director of the Harvard University Library and one of America's most distinguished historians. He serves on the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America and has been a trustees of the New York Public Library since 1995. In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Darnton defended a NYPL plan to liquidate some branches in the system while renovating the main Fifth Avenue branch. The essay sparked a number of responses. In November of last year, Darnton provided a status report on the DPLA. Darnton is the author of many influential books including The Case for Books, Past, Present, and Future and The Great Cat Massacre.
Susan Flannery is director of libraries for the City of Cambridge and past president of the Massachusetts Library Association.
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Continue reading "Video, Robert Darnton and Susan Flannery: "Digitizing the Culture of Print: The Digital Public Library of America and Other Urgent Projects"" »
Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes far beyond today's e-books. The creators of electronic literature have developed new interface methods, new techniques for collaboration, and new ways of linking language, computing, and other media elements. How has electronic literature influenced other media, including the Web and the book? What are the implications of having literary projects in the digital sphere alongside other forms of communication and art?
Katherine Hayles is professor in the literature program at Duke University. Her books include Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005).
Rita Raley is associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she directs Transcriptions, a research and pedagogic initiative on literature and the culture of information. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.
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Continue reading "Video, Communications Forum: "Electronic Literature and Future Books"" »
Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today's unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a director who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age - a curator of digital artifacts.
Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise.
Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section of the event.
Ingrid Kopp, Tribeca Film Institute
Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history and a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians.
Moderated by MIT Comparative Media Studies co-director William Uricchio.
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As a prologue to the Futures of Entertainment conference, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? How does the nature of these cities shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation now permit individuals to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these apparently opposed trends co-exist? What is their likely impact on audiences and on the international media landscape?
Speakers include Sergio Sa Leitao, president of RioFilme; 2005 CMS graduate and author of Gay Bombay Parmesh Shahani, who now heads the Godrej India Culture Club and is Editor at Large for Verve magazine; and Ernest James Wilson III, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.
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As a prologue to the conference, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? How does the nature of these cities shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation now permit individuals to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these apparently opposed trends co-exist? What is their likely impact on audiences and on the international media landscape?
Speakers include Sérgio Sá Leitão, president of RioFilme; 2005 CMS graduate and author of Gay Bombay Parmesh Shahani, who now heads the Godrej India Culture Club and is Editor at Large for Verve magazine; and Ernest James Wilson III, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Continue reading "Podcast: "Communications Forum: Cities and the Future of Entertainment"" »
Digital technologies have exponentially expanded the power of government and corporations to keep tabs on citizens. But citizens in turn are exploiting new technologies to expose the activities of governments, companies and even each other. How does the persistence and ubiquity of surveillance in our digitizing world affect what it means to be a citizen? Does our emerging condition of constant surveillance encourage individuals to curtail how they speak and act -- or to offer more information? In what ways are new forms of citizen surveillance and public witness instruments of democracy and transparency? In what ways are they tools of distortion and propaganda for ideologues or special interests? Our panel of three distinguished scholars will engage these and related questions on evolving notions of citizenship in the digital age.
Panelists include Sandra Braman, a professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power from The MIT Press; Susan Landau, a visiting professor at Harvard University and author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, also published by The MIT Press; and Marcos Novak, professor and artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as news and information are available from a seeming infinity of websites, what do we actually know about the dynamics of news-consumption online? What does the public do with online news? How influential are traditional news outlets in framing the news we get online?
Pablo Boczkowski is a Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern Univeresity where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004) and News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (2010).
Joshua Benton is the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University -- an effort to help the news business make the radical changes required by the Internet age. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent and rock critic for two newspapers, The Dallas Morning News and The Toledo Blade.
Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff, a 2010-11 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world "Second Life," premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on Oprah Winfrey's documentary film club in 2011. He served as producer of NOVA's The Great Robot Race, and the development producer for PBS's Emmy-winning Rx for Survival, as well as documentaries for Frontline and Time magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "Online News: Public Sphere or Echo Chamber?"" »
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"" »
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?
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Continue reading "Video: Abrahm Lustgarten: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in 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.
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"" »
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.
Intro music: "Pruit Igoe", Philip Glass
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David Ardia, Daniel Schuman, and Micah Sifry
What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.
Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.
Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight's mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.
Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media
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David Ardia, Daniel Schuman, and Micah Sifry
What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.
Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.
Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight's mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.
Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media
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David Carr and Dan Kennedy
The fate of newspapers is an ongoing subject for the Forum. This conversation explores the migration of newspapers to the internet and what that means for traditional concepts of journalism. Amid the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, newspapers are adapting to a changing mediascape in which print readership is in steady decline. David Carr, culture reporter and media columnist for the New York Times, and Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of the Media Nation blog, explore these developments with Forum Director David Thorburn.
Among their topics: the best and the worst examples of news on the net, online-only news sites, hyperlocal news and collaborative journalism, business models for online newspapers, and the impact of social media on journalism.
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 Henry Jenkins' 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returns to talk with long-time colleagues about his pioneering scholarship on digital culture, his work as the founding director of Comparative Media Studies, and his experiences as a teacher and housemaster at MIT.
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(Intro music: "If Given the Option" by And a Few to Break)
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This panel explored theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding the study of media circulation in an age of increasing global connectivity. "Global media" often serves as a placeholder for media outside Anglo-American academic settings, with "global" gesturing towards "Other" media ecologies. This panel brought together scholars and practitioners who wrestle with the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of Anglo-American paradigms - both for media practitioners and scholars - in Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. In what ways can we move away from the "national" as the pre-eminent analytic frame? How do media producers in the global south grapple with the challenges and opportunities of globalization? What role are audiences playing in shaping media circuits? In tackling these and other questions, panelists Jonathan Gray, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako; and CMS alum Aswin Punathambekar SM '03, Communication Studies, University of Michigan explored ways in which recent developments in diverse settings worldwide might inform and revitalize our understanding of how media circulates. Henry Jenkins will moderate this forum which kicks off the sixth Media in Transition conference at MIT.
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The widespread adoption of computer-based methods of digital recording technology has profoundly changed film scoring practices around the globe, not least in Hollywood. This panel will explore those changes with attention to current techniques compared to those of past generations. Our speakers, Paul Chihara of UCLA and Dan Carlin of the Berklee College of Music, are widely respected professional film scorers as well as teachers. Drawing on their own experiences in film production, they explored the decisive changes in personnel, economics, and stylistic values at work in Hollywood today. Moderator Martin Marks of MIT provided historical perspectives and guided the discussion with questions for the panelists concerning the music of landmark films past and present.
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Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post- World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling alleys and other spaces where community members gathered. Might the political consciousness of the new generation be taking shape in and around popular culture? Are we seeing a blurring of the roles of citizen and consumer? Is this fusion between entertainment and news a good or a bad thing? What links exist between our cultural and our political preferences? How are activists and political leaders utilizing metaphors from popular culture as resources to mobilize their supporters? Is it possible that aspects of our popular culturemay generate utopian visions that fuel political change? These and other questions were explored by panelists Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC; David Carr, media and culture writer for the New York Times; and Stephen Duncombe, associate professor at NYU and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Henry Jenkins moderated.
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 A pioneering scholar of the Enlightenment and of the history of the book, Robert Darnton is the director of the University Library and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard. A former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, his books include The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He has written extensively on the impact of digital technologies on the culture of print and on the responsibilities of libraries in the computer age.
In this Forum, Darnton discussed and took questions about the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.
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How have American news media responded to this historic presidential campaign? Is it true, as many have suggested, that the influence of newspapers and television has declined in the digital era? Have the media become more partisan and polarized? More preoccupied with polls and campaign strategy than with substantive issues? Has the coverage by traditional media been qualitatively different from that by online news sources? In this first of two forums on the campaign and the media, noted journalists Tom Rosenstiel, who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington D.C., and John Carroll, a local reporter and media critic who teaches at Boston University, will offer report cards on the current state of American political journalism.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum
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The current generation of young citizens is growing up in an age of unprecedented access to information. Will this change their understanding of democracy? What factors will shape their involvement in the political process? Lance Bennett is Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, where he founded and directs the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. Ingeborg Endter is the outreach manager for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and a graduate of the electronic publishing group at MIT's Media Lab where her research focused on creating collaborative community uses of the Internet. She previously served as a program manager for the Computer Clubhouse Network, a collaboration between the Boston Museum of Science and Media Lab that provides an after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities use technology for creative self-expression. Alan Khazei co-founded City Year, which enlists more than 1,200 young adults, in 16 communities across America and in Johannesburg South Africa, for a year of full-time community service. He is currently founder and CEO of Be the Change, a non-partisan citizens' civic organization.
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Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance. Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists also keep company mainly within their own tribal cultures. This forum challenges this unhelpful division, staging a conversation between Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein, two of our country's most thoughtful and influential writers on the promise and the perils of the Internet Age.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly"" »
A salient feature of contemporary TV has been the appearance of programs that appeal more widely across national boundaries than many earlier television shows. Examples include a range of reality shows such as Big Brother or Survivor as well as fiction series such as Ugly Betty, which undergo relatively small facelifts before being introduced to new audiences. And many American programs – e.g., Lost, Desperate Housewives – travel abroad with no alterations, as country-specific promotion and distribution strategies adjust them to their new national contexts. In this forum, distinguished media scholars Eggo Müller, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio will discuss the origins and significance of the international distribution of television formats and programs.
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The prime-time series has been a central narrative form in America for the last half-century, as the Hollywood movie had been in a previous era. Are the radical transformations of television in recent years challenging this domination? How has series TV changed over the past 20 years? What does the prolonged writers' strike signify for the future of TV fiction and the medium as a whole? Leading writer-producer John Romano (Third Watch, Party of Five, Hill Street Blues) will address these and related questions in a candid conversation illustrated by clips from significant series.
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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.
More information on this event, the speakers, and a summary of the event can be found at the website for the MIT Communications Forum.
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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.
More information on this event, the speakers, and a summary of the event can be found at the website for the MIT Communications Forum.
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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.
More information on this event, the speakers, and a summary of the event can be found at the website for the MIT Communications Forum.
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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.
More information on this event, the speakers, and a summary of the event can be found at the website for the MIT Communications Forum.
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American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. In this Forum, our speakers discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement’s use of media technologies. Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to James Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family (www.family.org). Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. The Forum was moderated by the Rev. Amy McCreath, MIT’s Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT (web.mit.edu/tac).
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A conversation between Frank Moss, new director of the Media Lab, and CMS Director Henry Jenkins about ongoing projects and inventive digital applications at MIT's legendary laboratory. Demonstrations were also shown and discussed.
The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event.
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The Feb. 15 "Remixing Shakespeare" forum looked at how interpretations of Shakespeare reflect and are reflected by contemporary culture. The "home team" panel, as host Henry Jenkins described them, consisted entirely of MIT Literature faculty: Diana Henderson and Peter Donaldson presented while Mary Fuller moderated.
Henderson's talk focused on different versions of Shakespeare throughout time, spanning from The Restoration version of Nauhm Tate's King Lear and its happy ending to Campbell Scott's horror-film influenced retelling of Hamlet. Henderson explained "how the remix shows you a reflection of the culture at large" and emphasized that this urge is not new to digital culture. Reinterpretation and remixing is what keeps Shakespeare's works relevant and alive over time.
Donaldson brought the discussion online with his presentation of Michael Almereyda's 2000 film version of Hamlet. In this film, Donaldson finds a predecessor of collaborative culture with "characters now contributing to the remixing" within the movie. A pastiche of video diary, multi-layered meanings communicated through audio, visual, and referential metaphor, the film uses media to evoke new meanings unavailable to the text or performance versions.
Donaldson showed some Shakespeare-influenced YouTube videos and touched on some upcoming research ideas regarding collaborative authorship, sampling, and of course, remix.
This forum is available for download as part of the CMS Podcast or as streaming Real Audio.
New technologies are enabling forms of borrowing, appropriation and "remixing" of media materials in exciting, provocative ways. In this Forum, two MIT scholars who have studied and written about the remixing of Shakespeare will describe their research, show some salient audio-visual examples and discuss the implications of their work for contemporary culture. Literature Professor Peter Donaldson is director of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive which since 1992 has used computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production. Literature Professor Diana Henderson is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. She is an active participant in MIT's partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The forum will be moderated by Mary Fuller of the Literature Faculty.
The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event.
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This is the third and final forum in the Will Newspapers Survive? series presented by the MIT Communications Forum. Why Newspapers Matter, features Jerome Armstrong of Netroots.com and MyDD.com; Pablo Boczkowski, associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University; Dante Chinni from the Christian Science Monitor; and David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the Communications Forum at MIT.
The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event.
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(This has been converted from RealAudio to MP3 in order to be played on standard digital audio players, and as a result has a loss of fidelity compared to previous releases)
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This is the first forum in the Will Newspapers Survive? series presented by the MIT Communications Forums. The Emergence of Citizen's Media features Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, Ellen Foley from the Wisconsin State Journal and Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media.
The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event and our own Sam Ford wrote an article for the CMS page in October.
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(This has been converted from RealAudio to MP3 in order to be played on standard digital audio players, and as a result has a loss of fidelity compared to previous releases)
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The Thursday, Nov. 16 installment of the MIT Communications Forum series, entitled “The Craft of Science Fiction,” featured a conversation between CMS Director Henry Jenkins and Joe Haldeman, the four-time Nebula Award winner who penned The Forever War and who teaches writing courses at MIT.
The conversation included a reading by Haldeman of his work, followed by a discussion about the art of science fiction and the relationship between science, religion, and the massive rate of technological change in the current society.
Haldeman and Jenkins discussed the ways in which scientific knowledge plays into science fiction as well as the interaction between science and religion in terms of the sci-fi genre.
One of Haldeman’s observations was that the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks was a “faith-based initiative.”
“Calling 9/11 a faith-based initiative is just a way of putting Bush’s religiosity into perspective,” he said. “It was an effective act of war, in terms of kill ratio—the number of enemy Americans killed per terrorist death.”
The relationship between religion and science aside, Haldeman also discussed the writing process for him, joking that 110 percent of his writing from the first draft usually makes it to the final draft, as he writes very economically the first time around.
However, he said that’s not necessarily what he recommends to students.
“On one’s own, the best way to improve one’s fiction writing is to write every day,” he said. “Set a time limit or a word limit and work that long every day, in the same time and place, if possible, without setting impossible goals. Write a story; rewrite it; send it out to a magazine; start another.”
Haldeman also suggested that aspiring writers should join a roundtable workshop.
The audio version of the forum is available in full as a downloadable podcast or as a Real Audio stream. A more detailed summary is available from the Communications forum Web site.
The latest MIT Communications Forum, The Craft of Science Fiction, featured Joe Haldeman, four-time Nebula Award winner and author of The Forever War, his forthcoming novel The Accidental Time Machine and many other books.
This forum was moderated by CMS Director Henry Jenkins.
A detailed summary, as well as a Real Audio-formated audio stream, can be found at the MIT Communication Forum's website.
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Beginning this term, webcasts of all Communication Forum talks will be made available by MIT World, which provides free on-demand video of significant public events at MIT.
"The Communications Forum is a welcome addition to our video collection," said Laurie Everett, MIT World's project manager, about the arrangement. "These scholarly discussions help MIT World stay true to its mission to present a wide range of ideas and topics to a global audience of learners."
The MIT Communications Forum, founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool who taught in the Department of Political Science, has sponsored talks on all aspects of communications for more than 25 years. An article about the Forum and CMS appeared in the fall 2005 issue of In Medias Res.
"The rapid expansion of broadband and wireless technology makes these webcasts feasible and significant. The collaboration strengthens both the Forum and MIT World," said Literature Professor and Forum Director David Thorburn.
This spring, the Forum will sponsor a conversation between former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Thorburn; and three linked forums on the state of TV – the economics of television, the changing face of television news and a discussion with David Milch, creator of HBO's Deadwood.
The Forum will continue to make audio recordings of its talks available from web.mit.edu/comm-forum about 48 hours following live events. Webcasts will be available from MIT World approximately a month following live events.
MIT World currently hosts nine Forum events. To browse titles, go to mitword.mit.edu and under "Video Finder" select "MIT Communications Forum" from the "All Hosts" dropdown menu.
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