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CMS News
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
Continue reading "Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology" »
 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
Continue reading "Forum: The Campaign and the Media 1" »
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.
Continue reading "Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance" »
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.
Continue reading "The Myths and Politics of Media Violence Research" »
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.
Continue reading "A Conversation with Junot Diaz" »
CMS Co-Director Henry Jenkins last month joined the likes of Madeleine Albright, Craig Newmark, and Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson for a panel on how public policy and private initiatives can better meet the public's information needs.
Jenkins participated in a similar panel at Aspen last year on media and values and blogged about the experience:
As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.
Writing today after a two-month hiatus, I am moved to think about
solutions rather than problems. Perhaps this burst of positivism can be
attributed to the fact that the weather in Boston is finally pleasant,
after a long, bitterly cold winter and a short, stifling heat wave.
Perhaps the prospect of seeing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
campaign together at the end of this week in a bid to unify a divided
Democratic party is making me optimistic and foolhardy enough to think
that under extenuating circumstances (like a tense presidential race)
even enemies can find something in common. Perhaps seeing Pakistan
splashed across international newspaper headlines in the past few weeks, rarely in a positive context, is making me feel desperate enough to
think outside the box. Whatever the reason, I'm going to use the
following paragraphs to suggest that Dr A Q Khan might help diffuse
mounting tensions between Pakistan and the US as well as Afghanistan.
Read full text of CMS Grad Huma Yusuf's article "Greater Transparency in Policymaking Remediation" here.
Junot Diaz talks about his Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on The Colbert Report. Click here to watch the interview.
William Uricchio, the co-director of Comparative Media Studies and a lead principal investigator for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, will present a selection of lessons learned from the lab's first year in existence at the fourth Games, Learning and Society Conference July 10-11 in Madison, Wisconsin. From the conference's website:
Can we make a game that can be played equally by sighted and sightless players (AudiOdyssey)? How do we make a multiplayer game where the collective behavior of the players shapes the simulation (Backflow)? These are some of the research challenges presented by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in their 5-year initiative to bridge the cultures of engineering and humanities. GAMBIT Game Lab incorporates academic researchers into the process of game development, and provides a space for researchers to work across and learn from both Eastern and Western cultures. In this fireside chat, William Uricchio, a lead principal investigator of GAMBIT Game Lab, will share the techniques and strategies that have been particularly effective... and those that were not. How does this project compare with other cross-disciplinary game development initiatives, like the Dutch GATE project? Where are they going from here?
More about Uricchio can be found at http://cms.mit.edu/people or at http://www.glsconference.org/2008/person.html?id=326; more about the Comparative Media Studies program can be found at http://cms.mit.edu and more about the Singapore-MIT Game Lab can be found at http://gambit.mit.edu.
William Uricchio will speak about new directions in archiving-- social tagging, access, recycling
and the broader implications for the interaction between history and memory-- in his opening keynote for European Network for Cinema and Media Studies in Budapest, Hungary. Founded in February of 2006, NECS brings together scholars and researchers in the field of cinema, film and media studies with archivists and film and media professionals who share a common interest in academic film study and the preservation, distribution and programming of film and media art and the film heritage. Click here for more information.
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