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.
From Sticky To Spreadable: The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality
Many thanks to CMS alum/C3 researcher Sam Ford for putting together the presentation below. It also features former CMS director Henry Jenkins and C3 researcher Joshua Green.
How do you understand and measure success in social media?
How do you create content that audiences not only pay attention to, but want to share with others?
Do you really want to make a video "go viral"?
How does the language you use to describe social media campaigns impact the end result?
Based on years of researching how and why people spread news, popular culture, and marketing content online through the Convergence Culture Consortium for the past several years, our speakers are currently working on a book entitled Spreadable Media. This Webinar will look at what "spreadable media" means, why the concept of "stickiness" is inadequate for measuring success for brands and content producers online and ultimately why marketers and producers should spend more time creating "spreadable material" for audiences than trying to perfect "viral marketing." In this one-hour session, the speakers will share the ideas and strategy behind "spreadable media" and a variety of examples of best--and worst--practices online for both B2B and B2C campaigns.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era"
Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever. Panelists Doug McLennan (editor of ArtsJournal.com) and Bill Marx (editor of TheArtsFuse.com) discuss how cyberspace is transforming arts journalism, in some cases radically redefining its form and content. The forum debates what critical values from the traditional media should survive, explores how digital media is changing the ways we articulate our responses to the arts, and points to promising contemporary business models and experiments in cultural coverage.
Podcast: "Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops: the Networked Publics of Global Youth Culture"
What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of "new media" by so-called "digital natives" facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More important, what are the local effects of such practices, and why do they seem to generate such hostile responses and anxiety about the future?
Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger, DJ, and, beginning this year, a Mellon Fellow in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. His research focuses on the production and circulation of popular music, especially across the Americas and in the wider world, and the role that digital technologies are playing in the formation of new notions of community, selfhood, and nationhood.
Many people talk about "cinematic" games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture presents film clips from a number of classic movies, analyzes how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggests ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.
Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven first-person shooter Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.
In 1897, the year H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man was published, Marconi filed his patent and established the first station for wireless telegraphy, what would become radio. Wells's novel reads as if it were an instruction manual for the uses and abuses of the nascent radio voice. In this podcast, Picker argues that, in conjunction with the racist basis of much fin-de-siecle anxiety, the acousmatic status of Wells's protagonist allows for a conspicuous if incoherent racial performance. This performance tests the limits of Wells's sympathetic imagination even as it further amplifies the voice of Griffin, the Invisible Man. Picker begins with Wells's story and goes on to show how, when one attends to questions of voice and sound technologies in several different media, the racial and ethnic dimensions that become audible forge invisible connections among modes of art that we have been taught to keep distinct. Tracing a transatlantic route from fiction to radio and sound film back to fiction, this approach offers a new way to characterize a crucial period of change from the late Victorian to the modern world.
John Picker is Visiting Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, where he arrived this fall after several years as Associate Professor of English at Harvard. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes and has ongoing interests in sound studies, media history, and the literature and culture of the Victorian era. His many articles and book chapters include, most recently, an essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors and out this September from Harvard University Press.
Podcast: "Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture"
Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We'll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix's ability to effect actual change.
Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.
Podcast: "Communications Forum: Race, Politics, and American Media"
The election of an African-American president in November 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama's ascension transformed anything? Many people's answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media's coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?
Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News discussed these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. This forum is the first of two this term in our ongoing civic media series, a collaboration of the Communications Forum and the Media Lab's Center for Future Civic Media.
Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT. This was a talk about camouflage framed by the question of "how not to be seen"--in film, on film, as film. In the first part, Shell introduced "how not to be seen" in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. In the second part, Shell screened and discussed her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Blind as in blindness, and blind as in that actively constructed structure intended for the concealment of a hunter from her game. Shell's book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance will be published by Zone Books.
Ethan Gilsdorf discussed some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds--from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such "escapist" adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?
Gilsdorf talked about the culture's discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and looked at society's ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author's own past misgivings and final acceptance of his "geek" identity.
This year's Julius Schwartz Lecture speaker was transmedia creator J. Michael Straczynski, who has most recently entered the motion picture arena, writing the period drama Changeling for Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie, adapting such books as Lensman for Ron Howard, World War Z for Brad Pitt's company, and They Marched Into Sunlight for Tom Hanks and Paul Greengrass, as well as reviving Forbidden Planet for Warner Bros. and selling two new original movies, The Flickering Light and Proving Ground to Universal and Tom Cruise's United Artists, respectively. He has also begun work on Last Words, a pilot for a new TV series for the TNT network.
Podcast: "Anecdotes from a Lifetime of Electronic Product Creation"
A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cited numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and drew some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.
Podcast: "The Discipline of Political Messages in an Unruly Era"
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians' virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship - on statecraft and stagecraft - lie at the core of democracy today. Tucker Eskew explores the permanent campaign of the last ten years. What is "message discipline" in an era of atomized opinion leadership - a necessity or a fool's errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era's favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is "Fire!" being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo's "new ways", he welcomed dialogue on all.
Video: Media in Transition 6: "Summary Perspectives"
At the end of the three-day Media in Transition conference, panelists swap impressions and reactions, offering some notional themes for future symposia.
Mary Bryson frames her comments as "a mash-up aggregation." The conference's "massive disagreements and sometimes awkward silences and gaps" were beneficial, "as we make our way in the present imperfect of media studies." For Bryson, a key question arose: "What time is it here?" The past, present and future are now intertwined in media studies, and often in "incommensurable tension." The next conference might wish to "mobilize and re-territorialize" itself across borders, making itself available in multiple host locations.
The traditional discourse around libraries and archives no longer serves us well, observes librarian Marlene Manoff, who calls for a "new terminology to describe or think about collections of digital objects, especially when they involve new services and functionalities." She was "happy to hear a universal acknowledgment of the volatility and mutability of the digital record," yet finds herself "still at a loss when it comes to questions about what should or should not be saved." Colleagues in the profession have been "discussing the social and political implications of selection decisions for a long time," and today, with so many people creating and collecting digital objects and files," she perceives "a much broader conversation," although there is yet "no cultural consensus" about these issues.
John Durham Peters offers three observations: He first addresses the difficulty of organizing knowledge in a field as diverse as media studies (or for that matter, in other modern scholarship). Peters likens media studies to "a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities." He also gives "two cheers for breakdown," for the ways that archives fail to conserve "all kinds of stuff." He asks if we would regard Sappho as such a good poet "if we possessed all 12 of the books." He's not trying "to praise barbarians who want to burn libraries," but to point out that "what counts as historical record is exceedingly malleable." His last comment involves the "interesting reversibility" of transmission and storage. To "transcend time, we must use up space, just as to transcend space, we must use up time."
Thomas Pettitt admits to an identity crisis of sorts -- that "those of us who do literature but who have lost faith in literature as a rounded concept are not quite certain what it is that we do." Possibly as a result of the welcoming nature of the conference, he wonders if "over time, literature studies people will find our true identity within media studies." Literature is a form of culture production whose scholars focus on aesthetics, particularly those in a verbal form. The conference was absorbed with questions of quantity ("megas and teras"), but asks Pettitt, "Have we neglected (aesthetic) quality as a factor?" And finally, he found confirmation in the notion that "advances in media technology are taking us back to conditions as they were before some of the mechanical inventions." Is this "business of the future looking rather like the past?"
Podcast: Media in Transition 6: "Summary Perspectives"
MiT6 Plenary 5
Panelists:
Mary Bryson, University of British Columbia
Marlene Manoff, MIT Libraries
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
Thomas Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark
Moderator: James Paradis, MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies
Podcast: Media in Transition 6: "The Future of Publishing"
MiT6 Plenary 4 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
Gavin Grant, Small Bear Press
Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary Agency
Robert Miller, HarperCollins
Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book
Moderator: Geoff Long, MIT
Video: Media in Transition 6: "Institutional Perspectives on Storage"
European archivists grapple with the legal obligations, civic responsibilities and future prospects of their collections, which, thanks to the Internet and other new technologies, are increasingly awash in image and sound. As William Urichhio notes, "tradition-bound institutions know what we should be gathering: feature films, books, newspapers, political documents, but it's much harder to know what to do with things like social media...say, networks of interactions." Different organizations are evolving diverse strategies.
At France's National Institute of the Audiovisual (INA), Claude Mussou describes managing "memory and heritage policies in the information age." In the 16th century, she recounts, Francois 1 mandated that any book published would be first deposited in the royal library. The national collection law broadened over centuries to include new forms of knowledge production: documents, film, radio and TV, and beginning in 2006, websites, because of the migration of so many activities online, and because of the fleeting life of many websites. Says Mussou, "Twenty, 50 or 100 years from now, when scholars or academics look for evidence and testimony for what the 21st century was,...web archives will be a necessary and valuable source." She pointedly notes that we can't rely on Google or other commercial interests to maintain web archives, and therefore governments must not "surrender their role as gatekeepers to collective memory."
Sweden's national library recently merged with the national media archive, says Pelle Snickars, which includes seven million hours of media material. The legal deposit law mandates anything put out on tape, radio or TV must find its way into the state's collections. This imposes an enormous burden, both curatorial and budgetary. As it transitions to digital, the library must maintain its analog collection. Snickars says the larger problem involves rights: researchers would love access via the web to the material that's being transferred, but the material belongs to others. Snickars worries about the best methods for digital preservation, and whether quality concerns should be sacrificed to quantity demands, as more and more people assume access to information online.
The BBC boasts 100 kilometers of shelves for its A/V collection, says Richard Wright, from 1920s radio to videotape from the 1960s onward -- all of which must be digitized to be preserved. The BBC is converting 200 terabytes per week of current broadcast material -- an enormous commitment to digital. As Wright points out, "We're putting a very big egg in that basket, and the basket is not perfect." The risk of loss of data is proportional to the data stored, and since so much is pouring from analog to digital, "the risk is growing by Moore's Law." One way to mitigate this loss: avoid compressing data, and seek redundancy. As we've moved from stone, to paper, and onto disc, storage capacity gets denser and cheaper, he notes -- almost overwhelming: "It's why our grandchildren are swimming in a sea of digital photos." If we can't tag all this material appropriately, it will be "struggling to survive" for future generations.
Video: Media in Transition 6: "The Future of Publishing"
Nostalgia, anxiety and optimism mix in this panel devoted to imagining what lies ahead for the book, as publishing professionals and others discuss the impact of digital technology on the business.
Small Beer Press, Gavin Grant's boutique Massachusetts publishing company, "is still in the business of producing paper objects." But new technologies are transforming his work in several ways: He licenses some books via Creative Commons; releases others as downloads in a variety of ebook formats (generating these can be an expensive "hassle"); and deploys social media, in the form of blogs and Facebook-enabled communication, to publicize and attract passionate readers to the firm's website. Grant sees Amazon and its Kindle as a bully driving readers toward best sellers, and is interested in the "hyperlocal" possibilities of the web for publishing: finding readers for his one-of-a-kind publications, and inviting them to peruse his non-mainstream book lists.
Agent Jennifer Jackson describes some intriguing direct marketing activities made possible by the web, including author-produced book trailers on YouTube, and an online media project undertaken by clients and other authors: a website consisting of episodes for a fictional TV show. Jackson also maintains blogs that she hopes provide "transparency" about her end of the business, a way to bridge "the great divide" between agents and authors. Her authors are concerned with digital piracy but Jackson feels wide distribution of an author's work ends up generating more sales over time.
Robert Miller's frustration with the trade publishing model-- in particular, astronomical advances to authors, and book return rates of 40% -- led to HarperStudio (a Harper Collins offshoot). His notion of "starting something from scratch" involves making digital and physical books available simultaneously to the reader. His first offering is a collection of previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain that are available as individual books, or in discounted bundles with audio books and downloadable books. He celebrates the reduction in production costs in moving to digital, but he's wary of the small but rapidly expanding ebook market, which he anticipates will impose a "downward pressure on prices," a loss of revenue that will negatively impact his business.
Bob Stein envisions a wholesale evolution of the essence of books, from objects to "a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate." His Institute on the Future of the Book hosts experiments in publishing, such as one where an author essentially blogs and moderates responses around a particular subject. Readers could someday collaborate with dead authors, adding chapters to finished books, for instance. He sees ebooks as transitional: "The experiments which have to do with increasing sales of book are interesting, and will prolong publishing but won't invent the future of how humans work together to increase our knowledge, which is what publishing used to do." These new expressive forms won't emerge quickly. It took 300 years after the invention of the printing before the first novel was written, he notes, but inexorably, "we're shifting the ways humans communicate with each other."
Podcast: Media in Transition 6: "Institutional Perspectives on Storage"
MiT6 Plenary 3 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
Claude Mussou, INA France
Pelle Snickars, Swedish National Archive
Richard Wright, BBC Research and Information
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT and Utrecht University
Video: Media in Transition 6: "New Media, Civic Media"
As old media die, new forms are emerging, but it's not clear they will serve such vital civic functions as "helping people form publics," as Pat Aufderheide puts it. These panelists point to promising experiments in "Public Media 2.0," but caution that new media are not guaranteed to shore up democracy or invigorate public culture.
After two years of research, Jessica Clark has reframed the notion of public media as "outlets that provide context/content that allows publics to form around shared issues without political or corporate interference." Instead of a centralized producer (old media), user-producers collaborate, forming networks with the use of digital tools. Some novel ventures that "break out of the old zones:" cell phone reporting in forbidden areas of war-torn Gaza, and streaming iPhone feeds of local news from U.S. cities.
Ellen Hume faults traditional journalism to some degree for its own demise, because it did not "connect the dots between news and action." It stirred up emotions with stories but didn't give people "a place to go" with their passion. In contrast, new civic medium SeeClickFix.com enables the public to report a problem in a community (from potholes to graffiti), spurring government response. HeroReports.org encourages people to report instances of kindness. Says Hume, "These new media offer enormous opportunity for creativity, and unleash the ability to participate in public." But we haven't yet entered the era of full media literacy, where people become "part of the public, rather than cruising through."
Persephone Miel has been searching for "all that democracy we were supposed to get." In spite of the proliferation of new types of reporting media, including news aggregator, author- and audience-driven web sites, Miel believes the "old media model still does unique things for us." As traditional journalism fades, there's no new media replacement yet for its "editorial intelligence," its persistent, watchdog functions. Miel sees no evidence that "the volunteer energy of the blogosphere" will step into these roles. She notes several attempts at hybrid journalism forms: websites Spot.us, a nonprofit project for community-funded reporting; Global Voices, where correspondents in developing nations send out web dispatches; and Town Meeting 2009, a New Hampshire public radio web venture that reported on local governments' budget process.
On the technology front, Dean Jansen has developed a free open source HD video player, Miro, so people don't have to go through proprietary gateways or load specialized software to access web video content. He hopes to swell the ranks of user-producers in a more inclusive, participatory webspace.
Jake Shapiro's public radio exchange, PRX.org, invites independent radio producers to connect with local public radio stations through his aggregating site. Citing the "current collapse of traditional forms," particularly public television, Shapiro hopes to reconfigure public broadcasting. He says his marketplace enables content creators to find an audience, receive royalties from interested public radio buyers, create social networks, and potentially find alternative channels of distribution via podcasting.
Podcast: Media in Transition 6: "New Media, Civic Media"
MiT6 Plenary 2 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
Jessica Clark, Center for Social Media (American University)
Ellen Hume, Center for Future Civic Media (MIT)
Persephone Miel, Media Re:public and Internews Network
Respondents: Dean Jansen, Participatory Culture Foundation
Jake Shapiro, Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
Moderator: Pat Aufderheide, American University
Podcast: Media in Transition 6: "Archives and History"
MiT6 Plenary 1 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
John Miles Foley, Univ. of Missouri
Lisa Gitelman, Harvard Univ.
Rick Prelinger, Prelinger Archives
Ann Wolpert, MIT Libraries
Moderator: Peter Walsh, Andover Newton Theological School
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.
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.
Podcast: "Opening Doors, Building Worlds": The Origins of the X-Men
Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series -- a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Mr. Claremont addressed thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules. Questions and answers followed.
Podcast: "On the WOW Pod: A Design for Extimacy and Fantasy-Fulfillment for the World of Warcraft Addict"
A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of
intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as World of Warcraft (WOW) this event was held in conjunction with the exhibition SHADA/JAHN/VAUCELLE, "Hollowed," which includes the WOW Pod, a collaborative project by Cati Vaucelle & Shada/Jahn. Panelists included Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Postdoctoral Associate at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; Raimundas Malasauskas, Curator, Artists Space (NYC); Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program; Marisa Jahn, Artist in Residence, MIT Media Lab; Steve Shada, artist collaborator; Cati Vaucelle, PhD candidate Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; and Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Film Music and Digital Media"
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.
Podcast: "Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law"
A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?
Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.
Podcast: "Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan"
Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology University of Michigan
In humans, gender--femininity, masculinity--is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Robertson explored and interrogated the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She showed that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a "posthuman sexism," and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Popular Culture and the Political Imagination"
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.
Podcast: "Telling Stories In Print, Online and Onscreen: Walden Media and Family Audiences"
Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in tandem with commercially released family films, film adaptations of children's literature. He will also discuss why Walden Media as a film studio has recently moved into publishing children's literature as another platform for storytelling and content acquisition.
Podcast: "Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online Games & Virtual Worlds"
This talk, with Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explored the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of "fictive ethnicity" tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce used the example of the "Uru Diaspora," a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of "Uru Refugees," and referring to Uru as their "homeland."
Podcast: "Transnational, U.S.-Asian Cinema: The Case of Tekkon Kinkreet (2006)" with Christina Klein
Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become ever more common, distinct national cinemas are being replaced by a variety of transnational cinemas. Anime, often considered a uniquely Japanese cinematic form, is no exception. This talk will explore one recent example of transnational anime: Tekkon Kinkreet, the first Japanese anime to be written and directed by Americans. Christina Klein is associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 and is currently writing a book about the globalization of U.S. and Asian film industries.
Podcast: "The Authoring Challenge for Interactive Storytelling"
Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment. As head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at Santa Cruz, he is involved in such projects as automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Mateas is a collaborator on the interactive drama Facade (see interactivestory.net).
Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Campaign & the Media 2"
The Obama campaign's extensive deployment of digital media, especially its tech-savvy outreach to the young, was widely reported before the election. Some predicted that this digital advantage would make a decisive difference. Did it? What role did the Internet play in the election? How has it changed presidential politics? What are the future implications of the impact of new media on journalism and on American society? These and other questions will be addressed by Marc Ambinder, who covers politics for The Atlantic; Cyrus Krohn, the director of the National Republican Committee's eCampaign; and Ian V. Rowe, who headed up MTV's coverage of the presidential election.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum
Tak Toyoshima's comic strip Secret Asian Man has brought to light the challenges of being Asian American in America. Challenges like not being able to find his name on a key chain at souvenir shops, being asked where he was delivering the Chinese food that he just picked up and being his friend's default camera technician. In 2007, SAM began syndication through United Features and has since become a daily strip featured in papers across the country. SAM's focus has broadened beyond purely Asian-American race relations, and now discusses themes that involve dynamics between groups to which we all belong: race, gender, political, religious, left-handed, sexual orientation, dog people...etc. In this informal presentation, Toyoshima explores the relationship between his preferred content (the exploration of Asian-American identity), his medium (comics), and his mode of distribution (syndication primarily through independent newspapers). How does Secret Asian Man address the historical role of racial stereotypes in comics as a medium? What might his experiences as an independent comics producer tell us about the opportunities offered by alternative media?
Podcast: "Comics and Social Conflict" with Ho Che Anderson, Jeet Heer and Diana Tamblyn
Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.
Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Books and Libraries in the Digital Age with Robert Darnton"
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.
Podcast: "Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology"
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Campaign and the Media 1"
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
Podcast: "Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance"
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.
Podcast: "The Myths and Politics of Media Violence Research"
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.
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.
Podcast: "Remembering Los Angeles in the Digital Age: Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction"
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Youth and Civic Engagement"
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly"
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.
Podcast: "The Show Business High Wire Act: Walking the Tightrope Between Studio Filmmaking and Independent Production"
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.
Podcast: "Slightly More Than Expected from a Band of Novelists: On How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian (nay, European) Literature and Popular Culture (and then Came to Boston to Brag About It)"
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.
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.
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Prime Time in Transition"
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.
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
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.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2: "Opening Remarks (Second Day)"
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.
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.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2: "Metrics and Measurement"
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.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2: "Opening Comments"
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "NBC's Heroes: Appointment TV to Engagement TV?"
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Games and Civic Engagement"
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.
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.
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "What is Civic Media?"
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.
Podcast: "Technology & Media in the Experience Economy"
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.
Podcast: "The Harry Potter Alliance: How the Myth of Harry Potter Is Changing the World"
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.
Podcast: "This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker": A Q&A with WWE's "Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross
Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.
NOTE: This was the first of two colloquia about American professional wrestling organized this term by Sam Ford ’07. Ford taught a spring class on the pro wrestling industry and is a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He is a weekly columnist for the Ohio County Times-News in Hartford, Ky., and performs in pro wrestling events on occasion.
Podcast: "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"
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.
Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art"
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.
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.
Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Learning through Remixing"
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.
Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons
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.
Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Collaboration and Collective Intelligence"
"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.
Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures"
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.
Podcast: Ambiguity, Process, and Information Content in Minimal Music
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.
Podcast: "The Real World''s Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley
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.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Evangelicals and the Media"
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).
Podcast: "Old World, New World: How Communities, Culture, Connectivity, and Commerce are Changing How We Create Culture, Media, Education and Politics"
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
Podcast: Communications Forum: "What's New at the Media Lab?"
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.
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.
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.
(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)
Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Emergence of Citizens' Media"
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.
(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)
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Not the Real World Anymore (Video)"
This is the seventh in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Not the Real World Anymore was the fifth session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are John Lester, from Linden Lab; Ron Meiners, Developer Relations Manager at Multiverse.net; and Todd Cunningham and Eric Gruber, from MTV Networks. The moderator was Joshua Green.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Not the Real World Anymore (Audio)"
This is the seventh in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Not the Real World Anymore was the fifth session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are John Lester, from Linden Lab; Ron Meiners, Developer Relations Manager at Multiverse.net; and Todd Cunningham and Eric Gruber, from MTV Networks. The moderator was Joshua Green.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Fan Cultures (Video)"
This is the sixth in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Fan Cultures was the fourth session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Diane Nelson, president of Warner Premiere; danah boyd, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley; and Molly Chase, Executive Producer of Cartoon Network New Media. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.
Updated: the files have been fixed and are now downloadable.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Viscerality and Web 2.0 (Video)"
This is the fifth in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
This particular recording is of the opening presentation for the second day, Viscerality and Web 2.0, given by Joshua Green, Research Manager for C3.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Transmedia Properties (Video)"
This is the fourth in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Transmedia Properties was the third session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics; Michael Lebowitz, co-founder and CEO of Big Spaceship; and Alex Chisholm, ounder of [ICE]3 Studios. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "User-Generated Content (Video)"
This is the third in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
User-Generated Content was the second session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Caterina Fake, Director of Tech Development at Yahoo! Inc; Ji Lee, founder of the Bubble Project; Rob Tercek, President and Co Founder of MultiMedia Networks; and Kevin Barrett, the Director of Design at BioWare Corp. The moderator was Joshua Green.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Henry Jenkins' Opening Remarks (Video)"
This is the first in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
In this first podcast, we present Henry Jenkins' opening remarks. As we post these, please check Henry's weblog for further commentary.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Fan Cultures (Audio)"
This is the sixth in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Fan Cultures was the fourth session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Diane Nelson, president of Warner Premiere; danah boyd, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley; and Molly Chase, Executive Producer of Cartoon Network New Media. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.
Updated: the files have been fixed and are now downloadable.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Viscerality and Web 2.0 (Audio)"
This is the fifth in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
This particular recording is of the opening presentation for the second day, Viscerality and Web 2.0, given by Joshua Green, Research Manager for C3.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Transmedia Properties (Audio)"
This is the fourth in a series of seven podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Transmedia Properties was the third session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics; Michael Lebowitz, co-founder and CEO of Big Spaceship; and Alex Chisholm, ounder of [ICE]3 Studios. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "User-Generated Content (Audio)"
This is the third in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
User-Generated Content was the second session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Caterina Fake, Director of Tech Development at Yahoo! Inc; Ji Lee, founder of the Bubble Project; Rob Tercek, President and Co Founder of MultiMedia Networks; and Kevin Barrett, the Director of Design at BioWare Corp. The moderator was Joshua Green.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Television Futures"
This is the second in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
Television Futures was the first session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Andy Hunter, a Planning Director at GSD&M; Mark Warshaw, founder of FlatWorld Intertainment, Inc; and Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.
Podcast: Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Henry Jenkins' Opening Remarks (Audio)"
This is the first in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
In this first podcast, we present Henry Jenkins' opening remarks. As we post these, please check Henry's weblog for further commentary.
Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.
Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Craft of Science Fiction"
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.
Timothy Stoneman, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT, discusses his research on missionary and evangelical radio in America from an historical perspective.
Podcast: Scott Donaton, "Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment"
Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine talked about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.
Podcast: "MIT's ZigZag on Podcasting and the Future of Media"
Chris Boebel and David Tamés gave us an overview of the production of ZigZag, MIT's new video podcast/magazine, as well as a look into the future of media production, distribution, and consumption.
The next entry in this series, Why Newspapers Matter will be held October 5, 2006 from 5-7 PM at Bartos Theater, and like all of our events is open to the public. Check our website regularly for more upcoming events.
Our first speaker for the Fall semester, newly appointed MLK scholar Frank Espinosa, leads a discussion of his Eisner-award nominated graphic novel, Rocketo.
Sex in Games with Brenda Brathwaite, Professor of Game Design, Savannah College of Art & Design, whose book Sex in Video Games will be published this September.
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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Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT. This was a talk about camouflage framed by the question of "how not to be seen"--in film, on film, as film. In the first part, Shell introduced "how not to be seen" in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. In the second part, Shell screened and discussed her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Blind as in blindness, and blind as in that actively constructed structure intended for the concealment of a hunter from her game. Shell's book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance will be published by Zone Books.
Ethan Gilsdorf discussed some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds--from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such "escapist" adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?
