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CMS News Archives
 The CMS Colloquium Series is intended to provide an intimate and informal exchange between a visiting speaker and CMS faculty, students, visiting scholars and friends. Subjects relate to the various media we create and consume each day: film, TV, comics, videogames, the internet, and the vast body of emerging media that's being created as you read this.
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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.
Continue reading "Remembering Los Angeles in the Digital Age: Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction" »
 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.
Continue reading "Forum: Youth and Civic Engagement" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly" »
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.
Continue reading "The Show Business High Wire Act: Walking the Tightrope Between Studio Filmmaking and Independent Production" »
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.
Continue reading "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)" »
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.
Continue reading "Colloquium: Denis Dyack" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: Global Television" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: Prime Time in Transition" »
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
Continue reading "Viral Media: How's and Why's" »
This is the sixth in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
Continue reading "Futures of Entertainment 2 - Cult Media" »
This is the fourth in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
Continue reading "Futures of Entertainment 2 - Opening Remarks (Second Day)" »
This is the third in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
Continue reading "Futures of Entertainment 2 - Fan Labor" »
This is the second in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
Continue reading "Futures of Entertainment 2 - Metrics and Measurement" »
This is the first in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
This first podcast presents the opening remarks by Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, from the first day of the conference. A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
Continue reading "Futures of Entertainment 2 - Opening Comments" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: NBC's Heroes: 'Appointment TV' to 'Engagement TV'?" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: Games and Civic Engagement" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: Collective Intelligence" »
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.
Continue reading "Colloquium: Lee Hunt's New Best Practices 2007" »
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.
Continue reading "Forum: What is Civic Media?" »
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.
Continue reading "Colloquium: Technology & Media in the Experience Economy" »
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.
Continue reading "Colloquium: The Harry Potter Alliance: How the myth of Harry Potter is changing the world" »
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 world. 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.
Continue reading ""This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker": A Q&A with WWE's "Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross" »
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.
Continue reading "Love May Not Be in the Afternoon Anymore: A Q&A with Soap Opera Writer Kay Alden About How the Genre Is (and/or Should Be) Changing with the Times" »
What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "MIT 5: Summary Perspectives" »
Today, artists working in new media, including video, web projects and music confront contested and conceptually confusing terrain in which reproduction can be as perfect as the artist desires and endless copies theoretically possible. Yet many find the lack of clarity stimulating and a compelling space in which to break new ground. Why are so many artists today mimicking new forms of visual culture and their distribution systems -- even at the risk of confusion with their popular sources? How are artists debating the value of tightly controlling distribution of media art versus allowing its wider reproduction? What are the tradeoffs artists make between creating artificial scarcity to increase a work's unique value and increasing its visibility through broader reproduction? How are the needs of those who teach and write on video going to be met in the face of hyper-commodification?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "MIT 5: Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art" »
It is possible that live performance is not so live any more. In this talk, Sharon Mazer looked at the ways that audience “performances” may be seen to challenge the live-ness of the onstage action in the Road to Wrestlemania 23, which the WWE takes to New Zealand in early 2007, and in Te Matatini, the National Kapa Haka Festival, a biennial Maori cultural performance competition happening that same weekend. Mazer is head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand). Her book Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle was published by the University Press of Mississippi, and her current research is focused on Maori performance.
Continue reading "What's Live Got To Do With It?" »
Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "MIT 5: Learning through Remixing" »
How has the American tradition of intellectual property law understood the relationship between originality and tradition? What rights do artists and educators have to draw inspiration from or comment on existing works in existing media? What habits, beliefs, legal and policy decisions threaten the emergence of a more participatory culture? What have people done, and what can we do to protect the Fair Use rights of artists, educators, and amateurs so that explore the opportunities created by new media and a networked society?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "MIT 5: Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons" »
"Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "MIT 5: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence" »
Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and professional credentials co-exist and cooperate in a complex media ecology. Are we witnessing the appearance of a new or revitalized folk culture? Are there older traditions and practices from print culture or oral societies that resemble these emerging digital practices? What sort of amateur or grassroots creativity have been studied or documented by literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of folklore? How were creativity and collaboration understood in earlier cultures? Are there lessons or cautions for digital culture in the near or distant past?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "MIT 5: Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures" »
Recent trends in music composition push bounds by creating pieces which are either more complex or simpler than works of the past. And yet, our ability to understand and be interested in the compositions at these extremes has kept pace. In this talk, Michael Cuthbert shows how simple minimalist processes give rise to highly ambiguous structures, while many of the most complex moments are reducible to easier to comprehend processes. The effect of potentially endless works—including sections of Beethoven symphonies--will generalize the talk to other musical styles and other media. Cuthbert, visiting assistant professor of music at MIT, has worked extensively on fourteenth-century music and on music of the past 40 years. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy, Cuthbert earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.
Continue reading "Ambiguity, Process, and Information Content in Minimal Music" »
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. The previous entry, featuring Jim Ross of the WWE, will be posted soon!
Continue reading "The Real World''s Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley" »
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).
Continue reading "MIT Communications Forum: Evangelicals and the Media" »
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
Continue reading "Old World, New World: How Communities, Culture, Connectivity, and Commerce are Changing How We Create Culture, Media, Education and Politics" »
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.
Continue reading "MIT Communications Forum: What's New at the Media Lab?" »
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.
Continue reading "MIT Communications Forum: Remixing Shakespeare" »
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.
Continue reading "MIT Communications Forum: Why Newspapers Matter?" »
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.
Continue reading "MIT Communications Forum: The Emergence of Citizens' Media" »
This is an video recording of a lecture Jesper Juul gave to us on November 28, 2006.
What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.
Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Continue reading "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player (Video)" »
This is an audio recording of a lecture Jesper Juul gave to us on November 28, 2006. (A video recording of the same event will follow).
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