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CMS News Archives
- Roderick Coover, Temple University
- Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck
- Molly Sauter, MIT
- Dan Whaley, hypothes.is
- Moderator: James Paradis, MIT
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Continue reading "Media in Transition 8: "Summing Up, Looking Ahead"" »
Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users of social media) are not respecting the traditional boundaries of privacy and are choosing to share "too much information." Do these people's technical skills outstrip their social skills? Are they unaware of how information can persist and potentially damage their reputation? Or are the stern adults who question this behavior clinging to an outmoded idea of privacy? Are the apps and algorithms and platforms of social media invisibly transforming norms of privacy and personal freedom?
- Feona Attwood, Middlesex University (UK)
- David Rosen, author
- Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University
- Moderator: Nick Montfort, MIT
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Continue reading "Media in Transition 8: "Oversharing: The End of Privacy?"" »
It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations and have created powerful new instruments to monitor individual behavior. Do the ramifying systems for observing and recording our routine activities fundamentally threaten our privacy and freedom, as many have argued? In an era of dating mining and smart algorithms, is our awareness that we are being monitored, converted to bits and distributed among databases, changing the way we behave as citizens and individuals? Should it do so? Or is this framing of the question too pessimistic, ignoring the fact that many of the world's data collectors are or claim to be improving our lives by expanded productivity, services tailored to individual users, advances not merely in shopping but in health, education and public safety.
- Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University (Sweden)
- Kelly Gates, University of California, San Diego
- Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam
- Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman, MIT
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Continue reading "Media in Transition 8: "Surveillance: Big Data and Other Watchers"" »
Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside and at the margins of consensus discourse. Counterpublics can be spaces of political opposition - sites of resistance, civil disobedience, disruption - or spaces of play and self-fashioning, enabling the emergence of alt-, sub-, and fan cultures and alternative forms of community and identity. How is digital technology - and social media in particular - generating categories of identity and belonging that define themselves in opposition to established norms of personhood or community? How do the counterpublics of the digital age differ from those of the past?
- Cristobal Garcia, P. Universidad Catolica (Chile)
- Eric Gordon, Emerson College
- Henry Jenkins, USC
- Maria San Filippo, Harvard University
- Moderator: Noel Jackson, MIT
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Continue reading "Media in Transition 8: "Counterpublics: Self-Fashioning and Alternate Communities"" »
New technologies and media systems have been deployed for new distributions of power, knowledge and social organization. What do you see as the most compelling shifts in these sectors? What are the greatest dangers and opportunities, and with what implications?
Factors such as influence over regulatory process, ever-expanding proprietary claims to technology and code, and the control of information including personal data all constitute zones of contention in this time of transition. What techniques and strategies might we use to enhance public literacy and efficacy in these matters?
What role might best be taken up by educators and media specialists when the old certainties slip away? Developing new tools and methodologies to make sense of emerging behaviors? Recuperating lost literacy and cognitive skills? Deconstructing legal and regulatory structures, and pressing for new safeguards? Encouraging the production of new forms of content?
As new generations enter a digital culture that seems ever more taken for granted as a condition -- and ever more unfathomable as a technological practice -- how can we cultivate and empower a critical citizenry?
Networked digital technologies have been used to construct new collectivities and social formations. What are the most promising of these from your perspective, and what lessons can we take from them as we seek to enable individuals to engage with one another to form active and effective publics?
Transitional moments bring with them inadvertent opportunities, whether new forms of data (hyperlinks, tags, recommendation systems), new standardization paradigms, or new affordances for representation. Although these opportunities can be put to many ends, how might they serve the interests of illuminating shifts in power, improving social equity and enhancing civic engagement?
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Media in Transition 7: Power and Empowerment"" »
"Web 2.0" has been shaped by startup corporations and systems (such as Wikipedia) that employ large-scale collaboration and crowdsourcing. How do these two forces relate to the project of preserving our cultural memory?
A genuine anxiety of many computer users is that our collective memory will be too good: Old offhand blog comments, drunken photos on Facebook, and other communications may persist when we would rather they'd not. This concern does not contradict our need to preserve culturally important materials, but it suggests a related question: Do we need to consider how to be better as a culture at forgetting?
In the digital realm, does it still make sense to distinguish the roles of museums, galleries, and spaces for exhibition from those of archives and repositories?
Computers have proven to be a valuable tool for investigating our cultural heritage. From YouTube to the digital life of newspapers to video games, computers are also deeply connected to our culture and, in the past several decades, have been an important part of our culture heritage. Are there chances for a fruitful convergence between the project of computing on our past ("the digital humanities") and the project of understanding the culture relevance of computing ("digital media")?
A tremendous amount of important information is now being generated in digital form -- but this is not all of the material we want to preserve. How will the abundance of important digital material affect the preservation of traditional archival materials?
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Media in Transition 7: Archives and Cultural Memory"" »
The fate of narrative. What is happening to our culture's stories and story-tellers? What has been the impact, what is the future import of the proliferation of audiences, creators and of ways to communicate on unstable platforms?
Public spheres. How are new technologies transforming our public discourse? Are newspapers dead or merely reinventing themselves digitally? What skills will be essential for journalists of the digital age? Who will be the journalists of the digital age? What hybrid forms are already emerging?
Visions, Nightmares. What concrete emerging practices or developments inspire optimism in you, what tendencies most trouble you?
Panelists
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms"" »
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation--sponsor of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media--in June 2010 announced their 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. Together, these winners form another ground-breaking, visionary class of civic media developers, inventors, and entrepreneurs.
This is video of the announcement by Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen, as introduced by the Center's director Chris Csikszentmihalyi.
Please join us in congratulating the winners:
CityTracking, by Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen Design
$400,000
To make municipal data easy to understand, CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos.
The Cartoonist, by Ian Bogost and Michael Mateas, Georgia Tech
$378,000
To engage readers in the news, this project will create a free tool that produces cartoon-like current event games -- the game equivalent of editorial cartoons.
Local Wiki, by Philip Newstrom and Mike Ivanov
$350,000
Based on the successful DavisWiki.org in Davis, Calif., this project will create enhanced tools for local wikis, a new form of media that makes it easy for people to learn and share their own unique community knowledge.
WindyCitizen's Real Time Ads, by Brad Flora, WindyCitizen.com
$250,000
As a way to help online startups become sustainable, this project will develop an improved software interface to help sites create and sell what are known as real-time ads.
GoMap Riga, by Marcis Rubenis and Kristofs Blaus, GoMap
Riga
$250,000
To inspire people to get involved in their community, this project will create a live, online map with local news and activities.
Order in the Court 2.0, by John Davidow, WBUR
$250,000
To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage
that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation.
Front Porch Forum, by Michael Wood-Lewis, Front Porch Forum
$220,000
To help residents connect with others and their community, this grant will help rebuild and enhance a successful community news site, expand it to more towns and release the software so other organizations, anywhere can use it.
One-Eight, by Teru Kuwayama
$202,000
Broadening the perspectives that surround U.S . military operations in Afghanistan,
this project will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines themselves.
Stroome, by Nonny de la Peña and Tom Grasty, Stroome
$200,000
To simplify the production of news video, Stroome will create a virtual video-editing
studio.
CitySeed, by Retha Hill and Cody Shotwell, Arizona State University
$90,000
To inform and engage communities, CitySeed will be a mobile application that allows users to plant the "seed" of an idea and share it with others.
PRX StoryMarket, by Jake Shapiro, PRX
$75,000
Building on the software created by 2008 challenge winner Spot.us, this project will allow anyone to pitch and help pay to produce a story for a local public radio station.
Tilemapping, by Eric Gundersen, Development Seed
$74,000
To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs.
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Continue reading "Center for Future Civic Media hosts announcement of 2010 Knight News Challenge winners" »
Day 2 of Futures of Entertainment 4 is now sold out.
That leave just a handful of tickets available for Day 1. If you're still (inexplicably!) on the fence about attending a conference whose first day alone will feature Wired's Frank Rose, the head of the BBC's Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, NYU's Stephen Duncombe, and our old friend Henry Jenkins, register for Day 1 today!
Futures of Entertainment 4
November 20 and 21 (Friday and Saturday)
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 moderated this forum which kicked off the sixth Media in Transition conference at MIT.
Continue reading "Video: "Communications Forum: Global Media"" »
Today and tomorrow is The Futures of Entertainment Conference, co-sponsored by C3 and the Comparative Media Studies Department here at MIT. Since seating is limited and registration closed almost a month in advance, the C3 team will be providing updates throughout the next few days on the C3 blog in hopes of including readers in the discussion.
Check back throughout the day today and tomorrow for updates, and look through the program for the conference.
The Convergence Culture Consortium, in conjunction with the Comparative Media Studies program, will host the Futures of Entertainment Conference at MIT on Nov. 17 and 18.
Free and open to the public, the event brings together forward-thinking scholars, critics and industry executives to discuss issues regarding media convergence, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content and participatory culture.
"This conference is intended to create a space where representatives from across all forms of media can sit down together and talk about some of the core concerns reshaping the future of entertainment," said Henry Jenkins, CMS director. "Many of these conversations right now occur in commercially run conferences which are very expensive and not open to the public."
Speakers include The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, DC Comics' Paul Levitz, Flickr's Caterina Fake, Warner Brothers' Diane Nelson, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, television scholar Jason Mittell, social networking researcher danah boyd and representatives from MTV Networks, the Cartoon Network, Bioware and others.
According to C3 Research Director Joshua Green, the conference registration has been swift since opening as word has spread about the event.
"I think this will draw a wide and fairly diverse audience," he said. "We've received some interesting queries from industry folks, so I would anticipate the audience being a mixed academic and industry crowd."
Continue reading "November Conference To Explore Entertainment's Future" »
Registration is now open to the public for Futures of Entertainment, a free conference hosted by MIT, CMS, and the Convergence Culture Consortium, November 17th and 18th, 2006. Register today!
Speakers currently scheduled include: Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship), Paul Levitz (DC Comics), Diane Nelson (Warner Bros. Fan Relations), and Robert Tercek (Multimedia Networks).
As reported in this article from the MIT News Office.
"MIT Hosts Conference on Cultural Significance of Games"
By Dan Teven
The Computer and Video Games Come of Age conference opened today, giving Massachusetts Institute of Technology students the chance to hear an impressive list of guest speakers. Although the conference is free and open to the public, it was not widely publicized. About half of the approximately 450 attendees seemed to be from MIT, with a minority contingent from Boston-area game development houses like Looking Glass, Turbine, GameFX, Stainless Steel Studios, and Harmonix.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Interactive Digital Software Association and MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies, a first-year department that's not to be confused with the famous Media Lab. There were no holographic game interfaces or wearable computers to be found. In fact, it felt more like a "GDC Lite", with an overly long keynote by 3DO's Trip Hawkins but without the technical sessions or the hangover.
Trip's big theme? Computers need to become more natural to use - and they will.
For both content and style, the speakers from academia acquitted themselves better than those from our industry. However, many respected developers have yet to speak, such as Hal Barwood, Peter Molyneux, Gabe Newell, David Perry, Bruce Shelley and Warren Spector.
The best session of the day belonged to Geoffrey Goldstein, a psychologist from the University of Utrecht. After debunking the notion that games are addictive, Goldstein explained the difference between aggression and mere aggressive play. Boys running around and yelling on the playground are engaged in aggressive play, because they don't really mean to hurt each other. On the other hand, girls who say "let's have a party on Friday night and not invite her" are actually the aggressive ones!
Doug Lowenstein of the IDSA talked about demographics, revenues, and piracy. Lowenstein's best moment was his story about walking into a software store in Singapore, realizing that everything around him was pirated, and noticing a "Shoplifters will be prosecuted" sign by the register.
MIT's Henry Jenkins introduced the conference by citing Gilbert Seldes. In the 1924 book, "The Seven Lively Arts," Seldes argued that comics, jazz, and cinema should be taken as seriously as ballet or opera. Jenkins drew many parallels between video games and these forms of expression, and in particular, between games and cinema. (We've all heard the movie comparisons before, but I suppose we should be grateful, because Seldes also tagged vaudeville and musical revues as "lively arts".)
The conference concludes today, with sessions on the Aesthetics of Game Design, Games and Education, Games as Popular Culture, Games as Interactive Storytelling, and The Future of Games.
More information and proceedings from the event can be found at http://web.mit.edu/cms/games
(With thanks to Dan Teven and Gamasutra for the article.)
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